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Rustdesk's lesser known features (github.com)
submitted 9 months ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Rustdesk started as an open-source alternative to TeamViewer. Now, it offers more than just remote desktop access, making it handy for casual self-hosting.

With no need for (dyn)DNS, port forwarding, or a VPN, you can get:

  • Remote terminal
  • File transfer
  • Tunneling (similar to SSH port forwarding)
  • Remote desktop

I think it’s a solid choice if you have a simple one-server setup.

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[–] 11 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I did some digging and there's no real basis for most of these claims. The company seems to be backed by a weird commercial OSS VC, with a founder with a hand in crypto bullshit, but that doesn't mean that the application is insecure. Also, for what its worth, I couldn't find any links to China outside of the rendezvous server thing.

I checked the wiki page edits - not sure which one you're referring to but I didn't see anything malicous or suspicious.

This article summed it up well https://hackaday.com/2024/03/01/this-week-in-security-forksquatting-rustdesk-and-mms/

TL;DR it's not an issue

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Chinese company profile

    https://tracxn.com/d/companies/rustdesk/__hVv0PUAcFB2LfybEPDvvPkJf14Mc7PfmkSGfqXkYxsg

    News piece about them

    https://inf.news/en/tech/b99963560cecae8e1dfe347c68e36ff8.html

    None of this means much else than that I will not use it myself, at least yet. I don't trust it

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    That news source is a joke. Go to the homepage and its filled with weird anti Chinese stuff about cannibalism in Shanghai! The first article on the homepage is:

    Emperor Kangxi imprisoned him and raised him like a pig, so out of boredom he could only have children for fun, resulting in him fathering 29 children.

    This is not a credible news source.

    The "Chinese company profile" you linked is a VC research page, not an authoritative source.

    There could be weirdness going on here though despite all that. The claim they are based in Singapore while Huabing Zhou of Wuhan University clearly has input (when I looked him up, the RustDesk team page was a search result on DDG, despite his name not appearing on the linked page) is a little odd. But as long as all the code is open I'm not too worried for self-hosters.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Thanks for the additional digging.

    Is it totally open source? Because I am not suited to verify this - I can only see that at some point it was not open source while claiming to be, and relied on binary blobs. Their server side code? Cannot know what is in there (of course). Running your own server? Cannot really vet the code either, so until it becomes still more popular I cannot trust it yet.

    I mean, it is probably fine, I hope it is.

    They have scrubbed Zhou from the company info page. They were listed as founder before among the two other people (who may or may not be real - this is another question mark I saw). This scrubbing could, of course be non nefarious. But I think this could have and should have been communicated better.

    But instead they seem to shut down discussion: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1159#discussioncomment-3312105

    None of this has to mean anything much but I personally will continue with paid options still for now and keep hoping rd would turn out alright!

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