RPort Remote Client Management

[marcusquinn]

• https://rport.io/ (note, the switcher to English is in the bottom-left of the site)
• https://oss.rport.io
• https://rport.io/en/faq
• https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/rport
• https://alternativeto.net/software/rport/about/

(cautiously noting this review comment on AlternativeTo:

"Open source encrypted connections to a remote desktop ala TeamViewer without needing an IP address nor port forwarding. However, no public instance is offered, so it's necessary to self-host. It works on virtually any device, including IoT appliances. User interface is through the web browser only. Note that although the client and server are open-source, the web user interface frontend is not."

)

Rport helps you to manage your remote servers without the hassle of VPNs, chained SSH connections, jump-hosts, or the use of commercial tools like TeamViewer and its clones.

Rport acts as server and client establishing permanent or on-demand secure tunnels to devices inside protected intranets behind a firewall.

All operating systems provide secure and well-established mechanisms for remote management, being SSH and Remote Desktop the most widely used. Rport makes them accessible easily and securely.

Watch our short explainer video: ::: vimeo https://player.vimeo.com/video/573085727 :::

Is Rport a replacement for TeamViewer? Yes and no. It depends on your needs. TeamViewer and a couple of similar products are focused on giving access to a remote graphical desktop bypassing the Remote Desktop implementation of Microsoft. They fall short in a heterogeneous environment where access to headless Linux machines is needed. But they are without alternatives for Windows Home Editions. Apart from remote management, they offer supplementary services like Video Conferences, desktop sharing, screen mirroring, or spontaneous remote assistance for desktop users.

Goal of Rport Rport focuses only on remote management of those operating systems where an existing login mechanism can be used. It can be used for Linux and Windows, but also appliances and IoT devices providing a web-based configuration. From a technological perspective, Ngrok and openport.io are similar products. Rport differs from them in many aspects.

Rport is 100% open source. Client and Server. Remote management is a matter of trust and security. Rport is fully transparent.
Rport will come with a user interface making the management of remote systems easy and user-friendly.
Rport is made for all operating systems with native and small binaries. No need for Python or similar heavyweights.
Rport allows you to self-host the server.
Rport allows clients to wait in standby mode without an active tunnel. Tunnels can be requested on-demand by the user remotely.
Supported operating systems For the client almost all operating systems are supported and we provide binaries for a variety of Linux architectures and Microsoft Windows. Also, the server can run on any operation system supported by the golang compiler. At the moment we provide server binaries only for Linux X64 because this is the ideal platform for running it securely and cost effective.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn v.interesting
Just been trawling for something like this
Obviously not trawling very well, because I didn't see this.
Thank you.

[timconsidine]

@timconsidine although bit sad to see no client for Mac with M1 chip ... yet anyway

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine I'm looking at others too - will post here if I have any luck. https://wiki.x2go.org/ might be interesting if we can get a test setup.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn before hearing about rport, I started playing with free version of https://remotedesktopmanager.com
Not opensource and def freemium model
But the free tier seems pretty generous
And generally it seems very capable (early days still)
I think I like the sound of Rport more though

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine If looking at proprietary options, and enterprise capabilities, then this, from Comodo, might be worth a look — free for up to 50 clients and pretty cheap if you're in the league for more than that:

• https://www.itarian.com

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn thank you !

[micmc]

@marcusquinn
Amazing finding bro
I vote.

[marcusquinn]

@micmc I dismissed it the first time around because I couldn't find the language switcher on the website to Englisch, hence noting it above.

[fbartels]

I started looking into rport a bit and while it does look interesting it relies on port forwarding for connections. Which means that each open connection requires an additional port that needs to be accessed.

Example:

• I want to connect through rport to my windows system via rdp
• I have to run the rport client on my windows system
• I connect with an rdp client on my local system to ip-of-rport-server:12345

Therefore one needs a port for the rport server itself and additionally a range of ports (default is 20000-30000) to function. I am not sure if that is even possible on cloudron at the moment.

Also the fancy ui that you can see on their homepage and the scripting stuff is proprietary and needs at least a trial to download and install.

A nice improvement would be an integration with guacamole so that one does not have to rely on local clients for ssh, rdp, vnc, ...

[marcusquinn]

@fbartels If it's not already familiar, I'm finding remotix.com useful to solve some of these feature needs. Obvs not all, bit also looking into opsi.org.