Cloud At Cost Remote Desktop
Recently I purchased a rather large Cloud At Cost service plan. It was like $240 for 8 CPUs, 8g memory, and an 80g HDD.
That’s pretty great even though the machine crashes and burns wayyy more often than it should. Well I do dig that it’s still somewhat powerful and I don’t much care that it dies weekly as I only use it for hacking on till I break it anyway, but I don’t like having to entirely rebuild my machine every time CaC borks it up.
To be a bit lazy there I hacked up a little script that helps me take their out of box Ubuntu 14 server and get it up as a remote desktop with some of my preferred tools. This could probably be used on any Ubuntu 14.04 server with minimal hackage.
It’s a bit vulgar, but we’re all adults here and it was hard to pass on this joke.
https://github.com/snuffeluffegus/ErectMyCAC
Some notes to be aware of.
- You need to have the ‘expect’ package installed. I think everything else is default.
- It’s not fire and forget yet. Keep an eye on it, you will be prompted for user input for grub and iptables.
- It does not handle errors. I’m too lazy to implement that in a non vital script.
- If your latency is bananas then you probably need to up the sleep time inside the expects. Sometimes CaC is stupid slow.
- Edit the line around ~118 if you want to add or remove packages.
- The firewall is set up with ports for ssh, http, https, and NoMachine.
- If you want to update the NoMachine.deb file go ahead and download the latest .deb package and just rename it correctly.
- Bro is the coolest IDS ever so we installed that slice of awesome.
- Your new passwords will be output to ‘CAC_{$CACIP}.txt’
That’s it. If you like it then enjoy, and if you’ve got ideas then please let me know.