I was having trouble with access to my work remote desktop from home. Each time I was told the issue was fixed, I went home and it didn’t work again.

So, I used my work PC to use remote desktop on my home server, and use that to remote access the work remote desktop again. Managed to troubleshoot the problem and complete the steps I needed to do on site to get this working.

I’m new to self hosting and am really enjoying having access to my home services. I chuckled at remote desktop inception, but it’s been really helpful in solving my problem.

  • Arthur BesseEnglish
    16•4 days ago

    Congrats on fixing your issue and progressing in your self-hosting journey… but… from a security standpoint it is not really a good idea to log in to your home server from your work PC.

    Anyone else who is able to run code on your work PC (your employer, rogue coworkers, hackers targeting your employer, hackers randomly exploiting the 15-year-old version of Office or other software you’re running there, etc) could easily discretely retain the access which you gave them to your hopefully-better-secured (or at least differently-secured) Debian home server.

    • @cRazi_man@europe.pubOP
      6•4 days ago

      Thanks. Still learning about security.

      Although this stance makes me think I should never use remote desktop at all. There’s no place where I could use a computer outside my house where I’m certain that they’re following good security practices.

      I’ve had trouble incorporating the TOTP plugin for Guacamole, so I do keep the Docker container stopped until I specifically need it. I do need to get back to trying to troubleshoot TOTP on Guacamole.

      • Arthur BesseEnglish
        5•4 days ago

        Although this stance makes me think I should never use remote desktop at all

        Yeah, generally speaking, remote access logically puts the remote system (or whatever resources are being remotely accessed) in the same “security domain” as the endpoint being used to do the remote access. So, system administrators and other security-conscious people indeed tend not to SSH or remote desktop in to important systems from other people’s computers :)