carl moonan | the dude abides

Apple Remote Desktop can do many things, by default each machine has the services built in but not started. You can use VNC based clients to connect and manage. The Apple client is not free but very functional and both require some services to be running on the machine you are trying to connect too.

Leaving these services on by default is great if you are on a lan but via the internet it may be a risk. If you use SSH to login and start or stop the services as and when you need to do GUI stuff may reduce the risk. See this article here on how to configure SSH to use v2 and public key based authentication.

To deactivate the services open a terminal and enter this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -deactivate -configure -access -off

To activate the services open a terminal and enter this command (please note the user name here is admin this may be different on your machine!):

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent -menu

With the two commands above you can leave the service deactivated. When required SSH to the machine and activate it, do your stuff and then deactivate it when complete.

To stop the services open a terminal and enter this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -agent -stop

To restart the services open a terminal and enter this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent

Based on this article here on apple’s website you can install, uninstall, activate, configure, and restart its components.