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I just reviewed this helpful edit suggestion and realised that Ubuntu 14.04 is the only currently supported Ubuntu the advice in the wiki is relevant to. What happened to remote-login-service, I wondered. I imagine systemd has eaten it.

Can anyone update the remote-login wiki to make it clearer what remote-login is and what's happened to it? Or is a tag on its way to being of only historical interest? Or is this tag one we should just get rid of because it lacks specificity?

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Alright, so, there are quite a few tags floating around for (roughly) the same thing:

  • - This tag, seeming to currently be for the remote-login service, but being used for anything remote.
  • - The overarching tag for anything related to remoting in to any machine (SSH, VNC, and so on)
  • - A subset of remote-access, seemingly meant for only graphical solutions.

Ideally, we'd get rid of as many of these tags as possible, which brings me to my proposal here:

  1. Regarding , make it clear that it's meant for the legacy remote-login service. Users who want to ask questions about remote access to their machines should use .
  2. Regarding , make it a synonym for . Access is broader than desktop, and this prevents confusion with Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol.
  3. Re-tag posts under to as necessary. That is, where questions are about general remote access to machines.

Of course, we also have the slew of specific tags, such as , , , and so on. These should be kept around, and should be used in addition to the tag.

There are rather few questions that I can see about actual remote-login, but it's still of historical note and is a valid tag in quite a few places, so I don't think it deserves burnination. However, as mentioned above, an update to the tag to show that it's unmaintained and is only to be used for the service would be a good idea.

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    The tag itself could be renamed to something like legacy-remote-login. Few bother to read tag excerpts.
    – muru
    Commented Oct 19, 2018 at 18:39
  • Thanks a lot for shedding light on this. I'd assumed the [remote-desktop] tag was actually supposed to be for RDP. These tags seem a total mess. There's also a tag [remote] - seems to me [remote-access] could be a synonym of that if it's not actually about anything more specific. I agree with muru about renaming the tag in question to something less generic-sounding to prevent improper use.
    – Zanna Mod
    Commented Oct 19, 2018 at 19:15
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I should have researched more thoroughly before posting my question, but I hoped for some community insight on a topic I don't know about. Thanks for your help, Kaz Wolfe and muru.

This tag is being misused. Of the 48 questions that currently have it, I found only these that are actually about the buggy unmaintained and insecure remote-login-service the tag wiki refers to:

All of the others are about remote access in general.

I do not think a tag is justified for 4 questions and since the software is apparently obsolete, we cannot expect further questions about it (except possibly "what happened to remote-login-service?").

I will destroy the tag unless there are strong objections, and re-tag the existing questions as appropriate.

I have asked a follow-up question about what to do with the various remote- tags so I know what to best re-tag these questions with.

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