Cloud At Cost Remote Desktop

John -

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.

  1. You need to have the ‘expect’ package installed. I think everything else is default.
  2. It’s not fire and forget yet. Keep an eye on it, you will be prompted for user input for grub and iptables.
  3. It does not handle errors. I’m too lazy to implement that in a non vital script.
  4. If your latency is bananas then you probably need to up the sleep time inside the expects. Sometimes CaC is stupid slow.
  5. Edit the line around ~118 if you want to add or remove packages.
  6. The firewall is set up with ports for ssh, http, https, and NoMachine.
  7. If you want to update the NoMachine.deb file go ahead and download the latest .deb package and just rename it correctly.
  8. Bro is the coolest IDS ever so we installed that slice of awesome.
  9. 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.