Turn on Remote Login and Screen Sharing

This guide shows you how to check, turn on, and turn off Remote Login (SSH) and Screen Sharing in a Pomme VM. Pomme makes these changes through the authenticated guest agent, so the VM must be running normal macOS.

Before you begin

• Start the VM in normal macOS. For details, see Manage the VM lifecycle.
• Make sure that the guest agent is connected. To check, run pomme agent status VM_NAME. For details, see Check, update, and repair the guest agent.

Check Remote Login status

To see whether Remote Login is on, run the following command:

pomme remote-login status VM_NAME

Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.

The command runs /usr/sbin/systemsetup -getremotelogin in the guest and prints its output.

Turn Remote Login on or off

To turn on Remote Login, run the following command:

pomme remote-login enable VM_NAME

To turn it off, run the following command:

pomme remote-login disable VM_NAME

Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.

The guest agent changes the setting and then reads it back. If the observed setting doesn’t match the request, the command fails.

Caution

Remote Login lets guest accounts sign in to the VM over the network. Turn it off when you no longer need it.

Connect to the guest over SSH

Pomme doesn’t report the guest’s IP address. To find it, ask the guest:

pomme exec VM_NAME -- /usr/sbin/ipconfig getifaddr en0

Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM. If the command prints nothing, the guest’s primary network interface might have a different name. To list all interfaces, run pomme exec VM_NAME -- /sbin/ifconfig.

Then connect from the host with an account that exists in the guest:

ssh USER_NAME@GUEST_ADDRESS

Replace the following:

• USER_NAME: the short name of a guest account that has a password.
• GUEST_ADDRESS: the address that the previous command printed.

For most tasks, you don’t need SSH. To run commands and copy files through the authenticated guest agent instead, see Run commands in a VM and Transfer files.

Manage Screen Sharing

Pomme exposes the following Screen Sharing commands:

pomme screen-sharing status VM_NAME
pomme screen-sharing enable VM_NAME
pomme screen-sharing disable VM_NAME

Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.

Before it sends the request, Pomme authenticates the persistent guest agent and checks that it advertises the ui.screenSharing capability. If the agent doesn’t, the command fails with the following error:

Screen Sharing is unavailable through Pomme because this guest agent does not support it. Configure it in the guest’s Sharing settings instead.

Note

The guest agent in Pomme 0.1.0 doesn’t advertise the ui.screenSharing capability, so these commands return the preceding error. To turn on Screen Sharing, open System Settings > General > Sharing in the guest.

To see the capabilities that a VM’s agent advertises, run pomme agent status VM_NAME --format json and read the guestAgent.capabilities array.

What’s next

• Run commands in a VM
• Automate the guest display
• pomme remote-login reference
• pomme screen-sharing reference