Teamviewd detected running on boot in Ubuntu

PCouture

I was having issues where my mouse and keyboard would stop working during times when my internet was badly connected. I discovered Teamviewer was running in the background when my computer boots even though the application was never launched. When the internet would cut out the memory and cpu associated with Teamviewd would spike and my mouse/keyboard controls wouldn't respond. I uninstalled teamviewer and it's since stopped.

I've only used Teamviewer once for a client meeting and then it was just to access a remote system. It's never been setup to control anything else or run in the background.

QPG

Teamviewerd starting automatically at boot is normal and expected behavior.

By default systemd will start teamviewerd due to the symbolic link created during installation: /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/teamviewerd.service -> /etc/systemd/system/teamviewerd.service

To disable teamviewerd from running automatically at startup without uninstalling TeamViewer, you could use systemctl to disable teamviewerd.

sudo systemctl disable teamviewerd.service && sudo systemctl stop teamviewerd.service

Keep in mind that this will prevent TeamViewer from operating properly until you manually start teamviewerd.

sudo systemctl start teamviewerd.service

 

PCouture

Hello,

To be clear, at no point in time is installing a deamon ( Or background service ), without directly informing the user, 'normal and expected behavior'. If your product team reviews the history of Linux they will understand that notices in BIG BOLD LETTERS are expected so customers understand what background services may be running that impact the users computer. There is also legal precedence where companies did this before without informing the user and were sued.

Secondly any background process that needs to run on a Linux platform has a need to run. Your software does not need to run in the background when it's not being used. I use your screensharing software twice a year. There is NO need for any process to run in the background and having a longer load time is something that doesn't impact me as a user.

Third when I ran tests I showed that your 'teamveiwerd' background daemon, when not in use, was taking up massive 90% usage of my Machine Learning computer. My laptop computer is a Intel i9-9880H CPU 2.30 Ghz x 16 cores with a NVidia GeForce RTX 2080 and 64 Gigs of Ram. In short it's one of the most powerful laptops on the market. Your 'teamveiwerd' was taking up so much processing power it preventing this cutting edge system from being able to use the mouse and keyboard. They system became completely unresponsive until the daemon completed it task.

It was also documented that when I was on a poor internet connection 'teamveiwerd' prevented me from accessing the internet slaming the outbound triffic with large encrypted packets.

Your background service, when not being required by the user, is functionaly handicapping computers. I would recommend either firing your Linux developer team and hiring competent developers, OR see if your company is illegally installing computer monitoring and control software to compete which in this Covid world most conference sharing services are doing, and maybe yours is doing illegally.

I also don't appreciate the fact that when I originally went to reply to this post I had to jump through hoops for reverification to prove I was a customer of your platform and the delays in the email responses. I also had 'Error' messages to my attempts are replying for 30 minutes and constant 'Verify your identity'. As someone that been through legal process your response time to this seems very much like a lawyer first reveiwed everything and then recommend a way to weakly cut my account off encase I wouldn't spend the last 3 hours getting it back online so I could write this.

QPG

When I referred to "normal and expected behavior," that was based on my personal observations of how this software has consistently worked for me as a Linux TeamViewer customer since version 8.

While not mentioned in the package installation guide, the teamviewer daemon is not, and has never been, a secret component of the installation. It is explicitly mentioned in the TAR package instructions as well as the output of 'teamviewer --help'.

If uninstalling suits you better than disabling the daemon or simply running it from the TAR package without installing it, far be it from me to disagree.

PCouture

Thank you for your response.

As a technologist and streaming video system architect, the fact that ANY daemon from a streaming video service provider is installed and runs constantly in the background without any upfront acknologment to the user is not ok. If you look at Skype their daemon has an icon informing the user it's active. Zoom's plugin is only active when the service is being utilized.

Also the original point of my article has not been addressed. This background process runs and processes massive CPU utilization when the Teamviewer client is not being used. In tracking down why my laptop was overheating, I discovered a process `teamviewd` running intermittently in the background taking up 100% of the CPU. On a poor wifi connection, when this process runs, my keyboard and mouse became unresponsive until the process thread finishes.

My laptop is used for machine learning and streaming video encoding. During these times when teamviewd would run, it caused my work to stall and I was not able to use my system to it's fullest capibility. This issue isn't around it being a secret install but rather the software is doing something major in the background which isn't being identified to the user. It is also something the user should be aware is running and can be disabled via a GUI interface, not a poorly documented command line.

 

phil_castelli

https://community.teamviewer.com/English/discussion/comment/104784#Comment_104784

I've also noticed on my machine learning workstation that teamviewerd was running and using massive amounts of resources.

Not having used Teamviewer in months and having assumed that - just like basically every software I run on Linux - Teamviewer wouldn't run daemons without need and without any GUI indication, I almost instantly concluded (hopefully wrongly) that this internet-connected system was breached and someone was trying to steal info by somehow exploiting a forgotten Teamviewer install.

After isolating the machine and killing every teamviewer-related process, I've researched and found this post. Learning that "teamviewerd starting automatically at boot is normal and expected behaviour" made me very upset: there's no reason why teamviewer should use any resource on a system that it's not actively using it, the mere fact that Teamviewer was using resources on a machine that wasn't using it is actively is against Linux ethos.

I honestly want to know what your company's program was doing on my machine that required that amount of resources (I've noticed the problem when I wasn't able to run properly DL tasks on my 64GB memory system because teamviewerd was actively spawning processes on 16 threads) because there's no justification for that amount of resource utilization.

The fact that that kind of parallelized load is perfectly compatible with video encoding is a strong element for suspecting illicit activities happening on my machine. Unable to determine if that was the case and not having run any extensive analysis on outgoing TCP packets from teamviewer yet, I'm gonna refrain from advancing hypotheses.

For now, as a safety measure I'll just remove any Teamviewer install from our machines.

This is just creepy.