Tag: remote access

Two Keys and a Pair of Automated Hands: The Full Construction of the Companion Bridge, the Relay of Two-Sided UI Automation, and a Persistence Written into the Environment

A desktop app listening only on the local loopback is design, not defect — the direct intranet route never existed from the first drawing. The real fork held two keys: self-hosted servers pair with a twelve-character code, desktop companions pair with a six-digit one, and the two channels were long conflated — a six-digit code offered at the server address box was rejected on the spot with a demand for twelve. The final construction ran as a relay across two machines: on the Mac, an accessibility tree enumerated interface elements coordinate by coordinate with screenshot eyeballing, standing up the resident service and a fresh pairing code; on the PC, UI-automation scripts were placed into the interactive session through scheduled tasks because background sessions cannot touch windows. Six clicks in sequence — open app settings, choose connect from other devices, enter connect to server, fill the address until the check mark lit, click connect, confirm done — and the moment the window title carried the hosted mark, both ends returned 200. Credentials were written into the environment file with the active environment pointing at it, so the next boot reconnects by itself; the guardian driver refused to start in unrestricted mode, the guard standing his ground once more.