Comment by lsiebert

I think this is one of those things that is going to vary cross culturally, and trying to come up with a single perfect phrase that works well for all situations, for all people, from all cultures is going to be impossible.

Plus how did you come to offer help? Requested, vs told to help by a manager, vs offering your opinion off the cuff, vs have asked if they are interested in your ideas. There's a difference between offering your help as a favor, and requesting of them if you can share your thoughts too. That's all going to impact your best approach.

One thing that might work is to ask them to talk you through what they've tried, and pay attention. Even if nothing helps you help them, you are showing that you value their thoughts and effort.

I might use "we" language.. "What if we tried sshd?"

I might even restate the problem to get agreement but without stating the solution, and then build on that agreement "It sounds like you want to be able to access this machine remotely in a secure way that lets you input commands, right?" "Yeah" "So maybe ssh could work?" "Well it's behind a firewall since it's an internal server so you can't ssh in" "What if we could log in securely to a server behind the firewall with ssh from outside, and then ssh from there to the machine you need to access?" etc etc. Getting people to agree predisposes them to keep agreeing.