There are several things to think about when taking control of another computer, the Operating System running on it, the speed of your network connection and the tools you have at your disposal.

How To Take Control Of Another Computer

Operating System

There are 3 main choices of Operating system that the computer you want to take control of might be running, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Fortunately Mac OS X is based on BSD so the tools you would use to take control of it are the same as you would for Linux, simplifying things some what!

We’re using an old version of Upstart, on Centos, to manage stopping and starting our Node.js daemons, and one of the things the script does, like any good deamon, is change the user of the deamon process from root to something more applicable, security and all that 😉

The scripts look a little like this

!upstart
description "Amazing Node.js Daemon"
author "idimmu"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
env PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
env NAME="amazing-daemon"
script
export HOME="/root"
cd /opt/idimmu/$NAME
echo $$ > /var/run/$NAME.pid
exec sudo -u idimmu /usr/bin/node /opt/idimmu/$NAME/server.js >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log 2>&1
end script
pre-start script
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Starting $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end script
pre-stop script
rm /var/run/$NAME.pid
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Stopping $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end script

Which is nice, as it means we can use Upstart to stop/start/status deamons really nicely. The equivalent init.d script looked really horrible.

We use Node.js a LOT, which means we do npm install a LOT. And npm is pretty terrible, with horrible dependency handling so we can end up requesting hundreds of dependent modules with it’s recursive patten e.g. for just one of our projects we can end up with paths like

`
./node_modules/bcrypt/node_modules/nodeunit/node_modules/should/node_modules/mocha/node_modules/glob/node_modules/minimatch/node_modules/sigmund/node_modules/tap/node_modules

[root@hmon workspace]# find . -name node_modules | wc -l
2103
`

That’s 2103 node_modules directories, for an application we’ve written that has only 22 dependencies configured for it!