How to enable Apple Remote Desktop remotely
Suppose you have Apple Remote Desktop (which, it turns out, is a very nice administrative application if you have more than 2 macs to manage, or if macs that you manage are across slow net links). Suppose you need to connect with it to a Mac where you didn’t enable it in the System Preferences.
This is how you do it:
1. ssh to the machine (you *do* have to have sshd enabled, AKA “remote login”)
2. run this command:
$ sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all
This will enable ARD for all users on the machine. Now you can connect in and fine tune whatever you want.
December 10th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
[...] run remotely. Users have to have direct access to the machine either via Keyboard and Mouse or with Apple Remote Desktop. So pretty much the average user doesn’t have to worry about this [...]
January 25th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I have apple remote desktop set up, is there a way to send a unix command via ARD to start up “remote login” so i can ssh to their computers?
January 25th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Well, if you have ARD, why not just open System Preferences, go to sharing, and start remote login?
June 25th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Billo, we want to do it via command line because we’re not trying to freak out our users.
To enable SSH from ARD:
Run the following UNIX command as the user “root” on the target machine:
/usr/libexec/sshd-keygen-wrapper -i
(This creates the SSH keys.You might get an error; no worries.)
Then run this command as the user “root” on the target machine:
/usr/sbin/sshd
Then SSH in.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
My bad. Running sshd directly seems to not let incoming SSH connections complete fully. Instead of /usr/sbin/sshd, run:
service ssh start
as the root user. Voila!