My mom has a Mac, and occasionally something will fuck up in a way that is best fixed by me having some control over her machine.  I had one of those cases last week and it was embarrassing that there was no good way for me to get remote access.  Google Meet doesn't cut it, but there's a whole other Chrome Remote Desktop app, but that was a lot of hoops to install and gave up any hope of walking my mother through the install process.

As noted previously we basically just bought our way into a retro-computer collection with the addition of an Atari ST and two further 8-bit systems. This created problems for us, but we decided to solve them with craftsmanship and as a result Natalie built an impressive henge.

Previously my office had a bookshelf that Natalie built while I was out of town for work. It worked great for 10 years or so but the shelves were only 10" deep, and while I was able to cram an impressive amount of stuff on there, it had to change. So we designed one 24" deep with a work surface a couple of inches deeper than that, and then a 20" hutch for the top section. This will allow us to have several layers of display items with storage behind them.
Because as is my motto: "If It's Not Display, It's In The Way"

So we've spent the last week setting everything up and trying to consolidate all the new stuff into bins, test what's working and what needs repair, and cabling up all the systems and network hardware. We put two 12u racks in the bottom, one is full of network hardware, NAS, and webservers and the other has several Atari 8-bit peripherals that are hooked up and then storage for in-progress projects like the Kaypro II. We designed it with the three cubbies to accommodate our printer and scanner, but decided that they were better used with books and stuff, so as a bonus we swapped out the top on a metal cabinet we already had and it really fits in well.

You can already see there's room for 4 computers/keyboards and mice "comfortably", and we could probably have 6 going if we really wanted to add anything more. We'll be spending some time to come trying to find the most effective way to fill this thing, but I think it's off to a good start, and we can nearly eat on our dining room table again, so that's a bonus! I think all we have left to do is unfortunately send the Elvis tapestry on a permanent vacation and replace him with 3 or 4 bookshelves to hold all the software and documentation we got with this haul.

Success. Today we (Mainly Natalie), recapped the high voltage board and after a couple of long waits starts, it boots straight up off the 40MB hard drive into System 7.01!

Of course, there's nothing on this machine. It's got Word, Hypercard, and that's about it. No Mac Paint! No Oregon Trail! So the next step on this adventure is obviously going to be to figure out how to get some software onto the machine.

"Works As Intended" they said....

Unless Craigslist Guy was using a sharpie to play tic-tac-toe on the wavy checkerboard screen, we have different definitions of "intended".

Of course if the intention is that we have a project now, well then Mission Accomplished. Replacement caps are on the way. The board itself looks totally clean aside from the standard nicotine layer gooped everywhere, but no visible corrosion or damage.

As an Apple and Linux user, remote screen admin can be a colossal pain in the ass. On the Mac, we have a VNC server by default, but can't specify settings which will improve speed over slow connections, like lowering the color depth. I've tried alternate VNC servers in the past, but they all were painful to set up and still very slow over an SSH tunnel.

Several years ago I set up NoMachine's NX server, which is quite nearly as fast as MS RDP, and it's been working like a dream ever since.

This guide focuses on a Mac client connecting to a Mac server over an SSH tunnel.

Install NoMachine NX on both systems from the DMG. If everything is working, there should be a NoMachine menu in the menu bar on the server and some indicator that listening is enabled. Netstat should show the machine is listening on port 4000:

xrayspxs-iMac:~ xrayspx$ netstat -nat | grep 4000
tcp6 0 0 *.4000 *.* LISTEN
tcp4 0 0 *.4000 *.* LISTEN

With the server listening, on the client machine, set up a new connection. Most of this is totally default except that I un-checked "use UDP for multimedia" and set the target port to 4003:

To connect everything up over ssh, set up the tunnel by ssh'ing to your intermediate server. In my case I have the tunnel listen on port 4003, as shown in the new configuration setup, this is to prevent it overlapping with the NX server on the client machine:

ssh -N -L 4003:10.250.0.98:4000 xrayspx@raspberrypi

Verify the client-side machine is now listening on port 4003:

pro:~ xrayspx$ netstat -nat | grep 4003
tcp4 0 0 127.0.0.1.4003 *.* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 ::1.4003 *.* LISTEN

Then launch the client connection to that local listening port. This can be done via the NX menu in the menu bar, but I automate all this so that I am just clicking on "NX to Home", and a script wakes up the home machine, builds the tunnel, and opens the connection:

On the Mac, you have to run nxplayer from the NoMachine.app package, on both Ubuntu and Mac, the session ".nxs" files are in ~/Documents/NoMachine:

/Applications/NoMachine.app/Contents/MacOS/nxplayer --session ~/Documents/NoMachine/Connection\ to\ iMac.nxs

The full script I run is more like this:

#! /bin/bash

#ssh into the ssh server and wake up the target system with WoL then hang out 10 seconds for the machine to absolutely be awake
ssh xrayspx@raspberrypi 'wakeimac'

sleep 10

#set up the ssh tunnel with listening port 4003
ssh -N -L 4003:10.250.0.98:4000 xrayspx@raspberrypi &

# I am tracking all the PIDs so I can kill them later, this tended to leave tunnels listening and crap after a session so they need to be killed
sshpid=`jobs -p`
shellpid="$$"

/Applications/NoMachine.app/Contents/MacOS/nxplayer --session ~/Documents/NoMachine/Connection\ to\ iMac.nxs

# On the Mac I can't actually kill the pids, since the nxplayer forks off and the script keeps running. On my Linux client, the nxplayer job holds the script from completing until I quit it. I'm sure there's a better easier way on the Mac.
#kill $sshpid; echo "killed pid $sshpid"
#kill $shellpid