Let's consider a scenario. You've got a user of your software who's struggling with how to do something. You know if you were there, you could show them very quickly, but trying to explain via telephone or email is proving really difficult. Or perhaps you need to interact with a remote display for some other reason, such as running graphical software on the remote machine with the option to detach from the session with the software still running, and be able to pick it up again when you're in front of the machine. You also might have left some software or website open on your screen and decide you need to close it. All of these scenarios could be challenging to you, linux being a multi-user operating system and all. It's designed to allow multiple users access to the machine without running into each other, but what if you want to run into each other?

There are many different flavors of pptp clients, most of them graphical.  Although if you're unfortunate enough to be on a MS (Windows) system, you're stuck with theirs and all of its limitations, those of us who are fortunate enough to be working on linux can do much better.  This article will focus on setting up PPTP (Point-To-Point Tunnelling Protocol) clients from the command line.  The huge advantage that we gain by switching to the CLI (Command Line Interface), is that we're no longer limited in the number of open connections we can have.  It's also a very great deal faster to use the command line, both for setup and connection, and it's really quite simple.

Although it's relatively simple, I thought I'd write a brief article on the use of sshfs, because it's such a helpful tool. First, you'll need to have sshfs and fuse installed. You can get them here(sshfs) and here(fuse). The server (remote) side doesn't need anything but sshd (ssh server) installed. The beauty of the whole arrangement is that sshfs is really just a kind of wrapper around ssh/sftp, so the server doesn't even need to know about any permissions other than the standard ssh login. You can mount any path from the server that you have access to via ssh. Using sshfs from the command line is really easy. To mount a filesystem, you'll want to do so as your standard user (not root). Simply do:

sshfs user@host: <mountpoint>

and to unmount:

fusermount -u <mountpoint>

This How To will cover creating a shell script that contains your installable product inside of it and can be used to install your product on a target machine. This is essentially one file that contains both the files to install and the install logic within it. You'll need a few tools to start off with, namely

uuencode

and

uudecode

These are historical unix tools. From the wikipedia page, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencode