Impact of New Web-Enabled 2.x Repeater?

[B]

Hey guys, just in case you didn't notice, Rudi's got a new repeater in development with a Web GUI <b>and</b> with "comment" fields that may (?) allow users to connect by alphanumeric name?

[topic=27656][/topic]

What will be its impact on ChunkVNC, Rat's fork, and related Repeater-centric projects?

[supercoe]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention B.

Rudi has made a new repeater that will only allow a viewer to connect if it matches a comment that the repeater stores.

This should allow for better repeater security when a repeater is open to the public.

[B]

Oh is THAT what it's for? It amounts to a shared secret password?

I had no idea. I guess that means it's still connecting via numeric repeater ID -- so it's still on you guys to some day add alphanumeric repeater IDs?

Clearly I should test this on his open repeater.

[supercoe]

Rudi didn't want to change how the viewer and server works, instead he just wanted to change the repeater.

Now you can use the viewer to send ID-COMMENT:1234 with the viewer.
If comment checking is enabled the repeater will refuse the viewer connection unless COMMENT equals the comment that the repeater is storing.

I don't see the benefit of allowing a connection to the repeater besides numbers and Rudi doesn't want to change this because of backwards compatibility.

[B]

Well my hope was some day we could view a list of attached servers and connect to "Jimmy's PC In The Basement", just as I do with LogMeIn <b>today</b>.

I find that a heck of a lot more usable than connecting to "ID:345678 ID-COMMENT:1234".

I thought you were working on something like this?

[supercoe]

Working on it yes, anywhere near completion no.

I have been trying to get my AutoIt code to directly communicate through the repeater without luck. I can make the connection, read 250 bytes, get RFB 0.0.0 and then nothing.

I'm thinking that just having InstantSupport send data to a web server running some PHP magic is the ticket.

I'm not really happy with the state of 3.2 right now and I'm working on some bug fix stuff right now.

[B]

Sigh. Too bad then.

Why PHP? Wouldn't it make more sense to fork or link from Rudi's repeater C code; he's already got the web server responding to http? But I guess then you'd still want to wait for a Linux port from Karl or something...

[Rudi De Vos]

This was actual all done in pchelpware... and the old repeater had the special ports for it.

It is not complex.

1) viewer anounce himself i'm "somenameyouchoose"
2) server anounce himself i'm "somenameyouchoose"

Then the repeater answered, to server and viewer (green)
and reported the external(router)/ internal ip (viewer get server ip, server get viewer ip)

viewer try to connect to server -> fail, tell repeater
repeater instruct server to connect -> fail, tell server and viewer to use the repeater.

The problem, i had , is that you need some web programmer.
-auto account creation
-repeater can use this database to check connection access

10956 is finished, just waiting for the new java viewer... possible i have time in the future to play with it again.

[jcesario]

I have a working ChunckVNC (3.1) with my repeater and i was thinking to update to the latest versions (3.2 with https and repeater 2.0).
I have checked first the repeater and find out this repeater don´t have the option https/443.
This was removed or it's only missing.

[supercoe]

The 3.2 Https version was just a test.
Proxy support will hopefully make it into the next release.


I've been learning a large amount of php for a work project and will be doing some neat stuff with ChunkVNC once work is caught up.

[Rat]

Well my hope was some day we could view a list of attached servers and connect to "Jimmy's PC In The Basement", just as I do with LogMeIn today.

Actually this would probably be doable using the Perl repeater script. AutoIT can initially transmit a human readable string to the repeater, which can be modified to recognise it and store it in a log file together with the socket ip address. Then the client can request the list of selected clients directly from this log file created by the repeater and use it to initialise a selectable list in the viewer. (actually not all that difficult to do).

[B]

I think shadowfax's new work (repeater mod with libcurl http API plus mirroring) may help in that regard, but I'm still a bit confused by all the various interpretations of the repeater.

Even if I were crazy enough to try to do this myself, I wouldn't even know which project to start with, yours Rat, shadowfax's, Rudi's, etc., etc.

[supercoe]

I just like the amount of ideas that are coming out for this type of implementation. There is obviously demand for a system that keeps track of the connections.

[Rat]

Even if I were crazy enough to try to do this myself, I wouldn't even know which project to start with, yours Rat, shadowfax's, Rudi's, etc., etc.

Well firstly its not my "Perl repeater" its "Karl Runge's, secondly, its really quite easy to modify. I just had a look at the loop which does the repeating and I reckon I could easily detect an appropriately delimited string containing the server's human readable name. I could probably generalise this mechanism to allow the repeater to recognise any embedded commands and data in the data flow, so that it can insert custom data when prompted by either the client or server... Sounds neat hey?

[B]

Well, yeah, and it also sounds like an exploit waiting to happen.

Seriously it would be great if the repeater had that kind of advanced functionality; again I'm not sure which is the "best" version of the repeater at present.

As to your fork of Karl's repeater, I thought it was at this point significantly different from his? Is that not the case? I have them listed as separate entities on my "All VNC Repeaters" thread...

[Rat]

Well its just undergone a fairly significant re-write on which Karl and I collaborated, but to be honest its 95% his work still... (My version is however slightly different from Karl's)

"Exploit"! Surely you jest? Nobody would be that unscrupulous would they?

Actually you would need a "man-in-the-middle" tactic to exploit it externally. which is not really a likely scenario. The delimited string commands could be made further secure by encrypting them with a key known only to your compiled AutoIt release and in any case the commands would be only able to provide limited data and control. ie, Client Name and IP, Server Name and IP etc.

[slippyC]

This is my first post, so first I wanted to say thanks for the hard work!!!

Basically this is what I've been looking for. Tieing machines to ID's and then basically just having a list, at least, of which machines belong to what ID's and which ones are connected to repeater.

This really does not sound that hard to implement. Even if you had to have a separate connection to your repeater server to send "the name you wanted" tied to that ID. Yea, you would prob need to encrypt this info which would be tied to a salt you had in your ini file to encrypt the data.

Basically it would be something like this:
VNC server connects to repeater. Repeater has the ID's that are connected. You have a MySQL dbase on the back-end. VNC Server(or some kind of helper program) sends out encrypted ID and <name you choose> to php script. It ties the two together and then you have a dbase with what ID belongs to who.

Another way you could do it, which would be more time consuming. Just have a dbase with what ID=<what name>. So when that ID connects it gives you a more humanly readable name that ties to that number.

I know I can do the second option, easily. I would prefer the first option though. Might take some time and dig into the code and see how VNC works. I have never messed with VNC's code at all and probably like most of you, the main thing, limited time...

[B]

Well, that's the problem. Like me, most of us are too busy/lazy to do it, and are waiting around for someone else to!