Synergy

[bav]

This brief article on Synergy has me curious. Does anyone have experience with using this program on their various machines? Have a 2nd box I picked up recently that I'm going to use as a test server for it with the boxes at home.

[Marblez]

I used to love using it at work. Oh, it is so wonderful. You can even copy/paste from PC to PC. Lovely. So much better than the KVM switches that they moved us to.

Unfortunately, according to my WAN guys, it kept open ports on the network and could not be trusted as far as security.

[Dubh Aingeal]

Unfortunately, according to my WAN guys, it kept open ports on the network and could not be trusted as far as security.

Concept for it is a good idea, but until these issues are taken care of it will be a security risk:

Synergy does not do any authentication or encryption. Any computer can connect to the synergy server if it provides a screen name known to the server, and all data is transferred between the server and the clients unencrypted which means that anyone can, say, extract the key presses used to type a password.

You can get around that issue by using a ssh tunnel to connect the two systems you plan to use the Synergy application to connect. You would need to setup the tunneling not just from one box to the other, but open another tunnel for the return trip.