First of all thank you for this good work.
I am not a programmer but i was wondering if there is an app to run an external program like ssh etc. , or is there a way to do this?
Or is there a way to start a remote desktop in Nextcloud. Providing this would be a wonderful tool.
It would be an easy way for a user to start any program remotely within the cloud - if provided by the admin. Something like this is done with the external site app.
As an example proxmox provides this kind of feature to access the servers remotely. But one could use this feature to run remote programs on a desktop.
External programs like ssh, vnc or anydesk will do the job, but this is not inside the cloud.
How would you make this possible if just the faintest security is setup in your organisation?
Many hosts their nextcloud in cloud vendors or web hosting solutions, meaning you are browsing around in a sandboxed browser environment and are looking for features that could be used to start a very privileged process on tour local machine.
Or
You are looking for a way to offer a potential publicly accessible interface to bypass all of Nextcloud security settings and potentially the user credentials scope of the webserver (www-data on the host), by somehow offering a PHP envoke mechanism to do CLI, which is then transformed into a GUI presentation. This is possible to do ofcourse - there is a web bases OCC app but its deprecated - but for security then any of these solutions are endangering your system.
Thanks for your response. You are right in terms of security.
The general idea might be a bit different.
But you don’t have to harm nextcloud and the server, if the admin would be able to create tasks. Like ssh or vnc to a e.g. separate server. It would be the window (e.g. controlled by the admin) to a different program/server.
The charm would be that one could work on any computer in one web work place - your nextcloud setup. I thought this is the intention of nextcloud.
Just go into nextcloud and all your needed program (links) are at your fingertip, wherever you are.
This would be handy for home office, if a user needs to access different programs not provided as a webservice (for this there is the app external website) on different computers.
Teamviewer and Anydesk and a lot of other programs provide this kind of feature for a full desktop (with security risk) and do a good job.
Proxmox provides something similar in a browser window using novnc and specs to the VM’s.
Getting this feature within Nextcloud, would provide a lot of power and usability.
By the way, Nextcloud provides external storage, external websites both might have a security risk. External programs would be just a logical extension.
You could integrate the login page of your existing Remote Desktop solution via external links app. An I can picture how that would be used by normal users. They would login to Nextloud , then connect to a remote machine and from there connect via browser to the nextcloud instance
Joking aside… I see only limited benefit behind such a function and it’s not that simple if you really want to implement it in a useful and secure way. And apart from that I would strongly advise to put a remote desktop client infrastructure behind a VPN.
