Introduction#

If you have a media PC hooked to a TV and another PC right by the couch or wherever you are sitting, Synergy can be a cool solution as it will allow you to control the media PC with the mouse and keyboard of your laptop simply by moving your mouse outside of your screen on the laptop. Since Synergy is not secure, you need to use SSH and make sure synergy opens its more on 127.0.0.1 and not on your regular network interfaces. On windows your typical firewall will warn you if you forget to do that.

Ingredients#

You need synergy on each PC. You need ssh/openSSH on each PC. On Windows, it's best to just get SSH from Cygnus.

Recipe#

Configure Synergy server on laptop (the controlling machine where you use the keyboard and mouse is called the server).

1. make sure Synergy will open port on 127.0.0.1 by typing that in Edit->Settings in Interface field
2. In Edit-Settings again, choose to Automatically start when GUI start
3. Choose server mode in main window
4. Press "Configure Server" button and add a screen for the media PC in the matrix. Name it like the media PC's network name. Aliases seemed to be buggy when I tested (server did not start, maybe because of case sensitivity (ringo and Ringo)).
5. Start server
6. ssh command to start client and forward port: "ssh user@mediapc -R 24800:localhost:24800
7. start client "synergyc -f localhost"

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What, your media PC doesn't have a remote control?!

--scott, 06-Jun-2011 16:28