vnc

...and it's all free—so far.

Raspberry Pi today launched Raspberry Pi Connect, a free remote VPN service for all Pi OS users.

If you create a Raspberry Pi ID, you can sign up for Connect, install rpi-connect on a Pi 4 or 5 running 64-bit Pi OS 12 'Bookworm', and register that Pi with the service.

Then, on any other device's web browser, you can log in and remote control your Pi through Connect's web-based VNC viewer.

The VNC server is based on wayvnc, and the Connect service allows for as many registered Pis as you want (though I'm guessing the interface is optimized for the majority use case of one or a few).

I recently got an offer from MacStadium to use one of their dedicated Mac minis to perform CI and testing tasks for my Mac-based open source projects (for example, my Mac Dev Ansible Playbook, which I use to configure my own Macs).

So I thought I'd document a little bit in this blog post about how I configured the Mac mini for more secure remote administration, since Macs tend to be a little more 'open' out of the box than comparable Linux machines that I'm used to working with.

Securing SSH

First of all, I used ssh-copy-id to add my SSH key to the default administrator account on the Mac mini that was created for me:

[UPDATED: The developer of iSSH emailed me this morning with a couple of tidbits that will be useful for any early iSSH adopters on the iPad - see my updated notes in bold.]

One app I haven't had a lot of time to work with (yet) is iSSH on the iPad. I tried the iPhone version, but the tiny iPhone screen simply couldn't keep up with a productive SSH or VNC session.

The iPad changes the game, though; I can actually log in via SSH, do some real work, then go back to doing whatever I was doing on the iPad. Since the iSSH developers didn't have a ton of time to work on an actual iPad, there are some pretty annoying bugs right now—but these bugs will be fixed soon. Some of the bugs: