Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft

I generally like Jeff's content but this headline borders on clickbait. The "39000 ft" part is achieved with airplane wifi over satellite. Otherwise it's just remote shell to a Raspberry Pi.

Yes but the Pi is calling home, so isn't that trading privacy for convenience? And I fail to understand how it's more secure than ssh + private key? There is still a connection outside.

I agree it's click baity. My personal favorite related moment, where I felt strongly "the future is now" was when I connected to a research station running autonomously on the Greenland ice sheet... while flying over the Greenland ice sheet to the UK last month. I was able to debug a software problem via satellite link while hurtling through the air in a tin can. Blew my mind. The latency was about 8 seconds, which was painful.

My alternative: Tailscale + mosh (or RDP set to 16-bit color).

Generally like Jeff’s stuff but maybe rename this to “Remote shell into a Raspberry pi without a VPN”?

Otherwise no one on hacker news is going to care. We’ve been doing that for years on planes with traditional home VPNs or things like Tailscale.

If you’re too scared to run SSH on the internet, but you feel comfortable with a VPN… you probably don’t know how to use SSH keys.

I continue to be unimpressed with this guy and have no idea why he is plastered all over the internet.

As one of the comments says, mosh is great for this sort of thing. I use mosh from my laptop, and it is simply bullet-proof. I can hibernate my laptop, warm it up a few days later, and it's all still connected absolutely fine. Running processes that produce loads of output don't care either. In fact, it's now my preferred way to run long jobs for work that don't want to be interrupted by a dropped connection - the alternative is running them with nohup or "at now".

While the title might make one think, "They've caught up to 1999!", the real point of the article and video seems to be "Raspberry Pi Connect", which is neat, but somewhat orthogonal to ssh and to choosing ssh over VNC on an airplane.

Since many ISPs haven't deployed IPv6, or have done so half-assed, services like "Raspberry Pi Connect" may become more and more necessary. Some people have no choice but to be behind CG-NAT, like Starlink and T-Mobile Home 5G, so this is good for them.

While I don't see much wrong with "Raspberry Pi Connect", I'm not a fan of the intermingling between the for-profit and the not-for-profit parts of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Let's just hope the for-profit part doesn't decide that all the money isn't enough and they want to monetize "Raspberry Pi Connect" in the future.

And remember, kids, "Raspberry Pi Connect" is not as secure as ssh, so don't set up services lazily thinking they're protected! Set up key-based ssh, anyway, and heck, have VNC listen only on localhost and port forward over ssh so that your VNC password can't be brute forced.

I get that it’s Jeff, but why is this on the homepage?

Silly to think this is relevant at all to HN.

No thanks

The original Raspberry announcement about Raspberry Pi Connect

> All devices get remote shell out-of-the-box, and if you use a Wayland compositor, such as Wayfire, you can also share your screen. In practice, this means you can use screen sharing with Raspberry Pi 4 and later models, and remote shell with all models of Raspberry Pi, even the oldest.

Now I have another task to purge this out of my pi.

> It's similar to SSH works, but with SSH you'd need your Pi exposed to the Internet.

How does Pi Connect’s access differ from regular port forwarding? Isn’t the device still exposed to the Internet?

The article mentions Cloudflare tunnels near the end. Does this work on a similar principle as Argo? (I haven’t watched the video yet.)

The author meant to write “Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi from 39,000 ft.”

I didn't read the domain, and was first a bit upset that the OP apparently flew to visit a store[1], but then realized that it's Mr Geerling (I don't follow him) so I guess it's more of a work thing, at least.

1: Yes I'm from Europe and yes I know that the US is big and that domestic flights are like taking the (approved) bus for many of y'all, it just doesn't feel like something that "fits" today's climate, so to speak.

You SSH’d to a Raspberry Pi using plane Wi-Fi… OK?

For those like me that were wondering what the resource monitor shown in the photo is, it's btop.

https://github.com/aristocratos/btop

Does anyone know why it takes a few seconds to start a VNC session, even on a fast computer and a fast and low-latency connection? I'm using TigerVNC.

ASCII Star Wars is a limitation of the Pi? Bandwidth isn't always all that limited in-flight. I've watched plenty of sports on my phone.

A) this is great for hobbyists who aren't super technical, but

B) Tailscale achieves this, with even more security if you want (I.e. only make the box accessible through a subnet router within your tailnet) and

C) Most of Southwest's 737s have been updated with satellite internet that offers okay latency and high bandwidth. This will straight up not work on a regional jet with GoGo/intelsat terrestrial internet that relies on cell towers. Latency is way too high. Keystrokes take like two or three seconds to get picked up.

I have a static IP at home so I can connect via my homelab server (let's call it the bastion) to any of my Pis. No need for VPN.