How do you access your servers and applications remotely?

Question

I have servers and applications that sometimes need to be securely accessed remotely, over the internet. I wonder what tools most people in HN use to connect to their remote computers.VPN is commonly used, but it&rsquo;s good to see more details.

prirun · Accepted Answer

We had around 5 production servers colocated at he.com that were configured to use the serial port for BIOS I/O. This allowed us to manage a hardware RAID card for example. Linux was also configured to use the serial port for console I/O. We used "ttylog" to log all serial port I/O to log files.
Each server had 2 serial ports. We cabled them together in a circular daisy chain. To access server 2, we'd ssh into server 1 and use cu to connect to server 1's serial port. This was wired to server 2's console serial port.
The advantage of this setup is that even if a system had a hard failure and halted, we could still talk to it and get it going again. I guess it could be done with a terminal server connected to each console serial port, but the logging we got with ttylog was also nice: server 2's console log would be stored on server 1. And of course it was easily extendable and dirt cheap to implement. Worked really well for us for years.

justinludwig · Answer

WireGuard makes this really easy. A simple WireGuard jumphost works basically anywhere, for practically any kind of application: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2022/11/wireguard-jumphos...

yamrzou · Answer

I use Tailscale and expose ports on the VPN interface only, using a setup like this: https://tailscale.com/kb/1077/secure-server-ubuntu-18-04/

johng · Answer

Everything I do is via ssh or https