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Use AppleScript to interact with remote Mac users System
Harold Martin, who runs the Sherlock Channels website, recently wrote an article for O'Reilly covering some interesting remote access tips and tricks. One of the more interesting tidbits was the use of AppleScript to pop up a display window on the screen of the remote machine -- useful if you connect to your home machine while your significant other is using it, and you'd like to pop a greeting on the screen for him/her :).

There are some other useful hints in there as well, so give it a read-through if you're interested in finding out more about remote access and control ... and as a general comment, O'Reilly's MacDevCenter has a ton of great articles, many of which non-developers (such as me) may even find interesting.
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Use AppleScript to interact with remote Mac users
Authored by: maczac on Sep 30, '03 11:50:37AM

You can have fun with your younger kids on a remote mac with the speech commands (say).

I have been using applescripts for nearly a year now to fool with my kids on the upstairs iMac. Loads of fun, until they figure it out.

---
Chris



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Use AppleScript to interact with remote Mac users
Authored by: leenoble_uk on Sep 30, '03 12:26:41PM

I followed this article last week and reached the point about VNC and decided to have a go at that part.
I installed the recommended software but it failed to work how I would have liked. I traced the problem down to the fact you have to be an administrator user to use the VNC server, and I didn't want to leave my machine logged in as admin 24/7. In order to aid anyone who gets stuck at this point like I did here's what you need to do to be able to manipulate the screen of a non-admin user. BTW this isn't going to be subtle, they will see what you're doing so it's not suitable for mischief.

Install OSXvnc where it is launchable by an admin user.

~adminuser/Applications/OSXvnc

Log in to your non-admin account which you want to access remotely. This next part you can actually do via ssh (provided you've configured OSXvnc to serve on startup) from another machine so you can actually get the server running from another location if you forgot to leave it running...

SU up to your admin account...

su adminuser

... and enter the password when required.

type this...

sudo -b "Users/adminuser/Applications/OSXvnc.app/Contents/MacOS/osxvnv"

and again, your password when requested.

The VNC server will now launch and if you've configured it to start the server whenever it's started up you should be able to access your desktop using Chicken of the VNC. So anytime you want to access your desktop graphically you've only got to ssh in as an admin user and type one line to get your VNC server going.



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