How to force screen viewing on remote computer?

dtempleton
New Contributor II

I understand that the Casper Remote app doesn't do any NAT traversal, and you need to be able to make an SSH connection between yourself and the IP address of the remote computer.

It seems that a common way to get around that is to use a VPN. You'd tell the user to connect to the VPN, and then you could SSH to them.

What I've been told by the bosses is that we need a way to view the screen of a remote employee's computer without their involvement, in the case of a severe HR issue. We don't want to tell them to connect to a VPN first, or have them know we're watching.

Anyone know how we might make this work? Can casper suite tell a computer to connect to the VPN, allowing the SSH? Is there a different method (non-VPN, non-Casper) that you'd suggest for facilitating this? Does anyone do this? Thank you.

1 REPLY 1

lwindram
Contributor

I ran into a similar situation last year, except that I also needed a method to monitor activity when the device was offline. My solution was to take periodic silent screenshots and upload them to a network share at the regular check-in. This presented a fairly clear picture of the use of the computer, albeit with potentially significant latency. If you are interested, the scripts and LaunchDaemon are here.

It goes without saying that you should exercise caution when using this kind of monitoring procedure. The initial situation I encountered was with a student who was using his computer to arrange drug sales on campus, and I reserve this for use only in similarly extreme circumstances. The decision to deploy is always made in coordination with building administrators.

I also use it for monitoring my children's computer use :)