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I'm running a HelpDesk for internal call center employees.

Right now, we can chat with employees over our web portal and remote-control their Linux Mint workstations via VNC over a secure SSH tunnel. All employees have headsets in conjunction with their jobs, and I'd like to find a way to initiate voice-chat with them over SSH in order to better aid in remote support.

After some googling, I found two commands:

arecord -f cd -t raw | oggenc - -r | ssh admin@REMOTEUSER mplayer -

and 

dd if=/dev/dsp | ssh -c arcfour -C admin@REMOTEUSER dd of=/dev/dsp

Neither of these commands (with proper credentials) seemed to work in my testing, however.

Does anyone know how I can establish a live voice connection over SSH to an employee's machine? I have root access to the remote machines, so that won't be a problem.

UPDATE:

I tried hosting a Murmur server on my local network. Opening Mumble over SSH does work, but I can't seem to get Mumble to launch minimized (or without the GUI). Are there any other voice-chat solutions which I could host over LAN and hide the employee's chat GUI?

Jared Dalton
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    The specific commands you tried may not work (`/dev/dsp` seems a little archaic, for example) but it will be possible to find a variant that works... but some value of "works". The problem that you will not be able to solve with this method is that SSH provides a reliable stream over TCP. Live audio will work much better with a protocol like UDP that can drop delayed audio, modulate jitter, resync the stream, etc... – Celada Apr 21 '15 at 23:50
  • Interesting... Ultimately, my goal is to be able to initiate a voice chat with employees without them having to interact with their workstations. (A certain percentage of our call center employees aren't particularly intuitive, so we try to utilize background solutions whenever possible.) Is there a udp solution we could launch from my end in order to connect with employees without their interaction? (With my proper root credentials, of course.) – Jared Dalton Apr 22 '15 at 04:21
  • @JaredDalton Are you trying to have a two-way chat? Based on your commands it looks like you're just trying to forward audio from your host to a remote host. – igal Oct 25 '17 at 12:08
  • @JaredDalton You might want to look at tunneling PulseAudio over SSH. I've used successfully in the reverse direction of what you've described (i.e. I play remote audio sources locally). – igal Oct 25 '17 at 12:18

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