Temporary Connections

Sometimes it’s desirable to have a temporary connection to a computer that won’t have BlueSky permanently installed. That’s where the Temporary Client app in your admin apps comes into play.

Before you deploy this, copy/paste your own logo on this app (use the Get Info window) and name it to match your branding. In the screenshots below, I used some other icon and named it “AcmeCo Remote Help.”

This app is designed to be emailed to or downloaded by a user who opens it to get you a remote connection. When they open it, they are likely to see an Apple quarantine warning. You can avoid this by codesigning the Apple script (assuming you have Apple Developer account), or asking them to do the right-click of shame.

And then it displays a dialog explaining what the app is about to do and effectively granting you permission to do things to their computer:

When they click run, it goes through the background process of generating a temporary key, uploading it to your BlueSky server, and connecting. If there’s a problem, an error will be displayed and it will quit. The app also checks to see that SSH and VNC are running and if not, opens Sharing.prefpane and asks the user to correct that while it continues to connect. You can advise them to check the boxes next to Remote Login and/or Screen Sharing/Remote Management.

When it connects it displays a random temporary BlueSky ID in the 1950-1999 range. This is the ID you will use with BlueSky Connect or File Transfer.

You or the user can hit OK and the app will remain connected. The app remains sitting in the Dock watching to ensure the connection stays up.

If the connection drops for some reason, the app will not try to reestablish, instead it will display this error for the user:

When the you or user quits the app voluntarily, it disconnects. And the keys that it generated and uploaded are deleted from the server after 4 hours.