How to control your dad via the net?

[Tassilo Horn]

Hi all,

I'm one of those poor guys that are son and dad's sysadmin in one
person.  He uses a laptop with Gentoo GNU/Linux and KDE4.  He frequently
manages to wreck his system, and there are quite some kilometers between
where I'm and he is living.

So what's the best way to take control of his machine?

Currently, I've setup a DynDNS account for him and use SSH (with X11
forwarding) to connect to the system.  This is quite ok for normal
administration like system updates, but with user problems, it is not
too good, cause my father writes me "bug reports" like:

  There's this little thingy right there in the corner of such another
  thingy, and then it started blinking and now it doesn't work anymore.

He doesn't even know what programs he uses for some task, and for him
all his text documents are part of his writing application.

So as you can see, with those bad information reproducing a problem only
with SSH is pretty hard to do, and some apps like OpenOffice don't work
with X11 forwarding.

So what would be brilliant was something that I can see his desktop
exactly what he sees it and also control his mouse and keyboard, kinda
like desktop sharing.  Is there something like that for KDE/Linux?

If there's nothing like that, some remote desktop solution would be also
ok.  After googling, it seems that Xrdp [1] is the only remote desktop
protocol server implementation for Linux, and that project seems to be
dead since 3 years.  But if nobody suggests something else, I'll try it
out anyway.

I'm happy for any advices!
Tassilo

__________
[1] http://xrdp.sourceforge.net/
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