nems-tools: NEMS Hero

In the event of a catastrophic issue, such as a corrupt NEMS user or forgotten password, NEMS Linux technical support may use NEMS Hero to recover your NEMS Server, or to provide technical assistance.

NEMS Hero grants temporary root access to a NEMS Server which has been freshly rebooted, and only if the NEMS Server is accessible (via a LAN or WAN connection).

NEMS Hero Security

NEMS Hero uses an RSA key pair to establish an SSH trust relationship between a NEMS Server and the NEMS Linux technical support team. This trust relationship self destructs once a NEMS Server has been running for more than 15 minutes.

In order for a connection to be established, the following conditions must be met:

  1. port forwarding must be setup on the network of the NEMS Server to allow a support technician remote SSH access to port 22 on the NEMS Server,

  2. the NEMS Server must have been rebooted within the past 15 minutes,

  3. the NEMS Server must not have a /boot/no-hero file in place,

  4. the NEMS Linux technical support representative must have our private RSA key,

  5. the NEMS Linux technical support representative must know our strong password to access the private RSA key.

Tip

If desired, this functionality can be disabled on a self-hosted NEMS Server by creating a file /boot/no-hero on your NEMS Server. Because the /boot partition can be viewed and modified by plugging your NEMS Server’s storage into a Windows, macOS or Linux computer, you can easily delete that file later and reboot your NEMS Server to re-enable NEMS Hero.

System Requirements

NEMS Hero requires NEMS Linux 1.6 or higher.