Well holy shit. The Average White Guy might actually post something useful for once…maybe.

I’m no stranger to remote administration. I use a particular brand of remote administration software out there to remote into my primary machine at home to run tasks that I wouldn’t want to do while I’m using it. Things like run a virus scan, defragment the drive, etc… It’s good stuff, but just like anything else, it’s not a perfect solution, and it’s not right in all instances. I hate using it at work, but I love installing a remore administration package on friends and family computers, so I don’t have to drive all over the city to fix small computer problems for the folks. In this situation it’s terrific.

Where I work, I have software installed in the field which I need to support. Yes, my firm does have a highly-qualified technical support team, but the application I’ve inherited is new, and is not well documented, nor is it intuitive enough to configure/fix/etc… without help from engineering (me). My solutions is a client/server application, which typically includes 5-10 clients for the single server. Often times, it requires a remote administration portal to fix problems from my office out there in the field.

Depending on which installation I’m dealing with, I use a variety of remoting tools:

  • Cisco’s VPN Client - A decent, unobtrusive VPN client. It’s hell to configure for each VPN, but once that’s done, it’s “point and click”.
  • Citrix MetaFrameXP - Another VPN application. Although each VPN client is about the same, MetaFrameXP is web-based, so if you can login through their website, you’re connected to the remote network.
  • Microsoft XP’s built-in “Remote Desktop Connection” - Say what you will about Microsoft, but this application is fantastic. Run a windows session remotely. When you login it’s like you sitting at the machine. Sure there’s a little network delay, but RDC handles it nicely. We use this here to access our server once connected to the VPN.
  • Symantec’s PCAnywhere - This is the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever seen, but we use it here at work because it’s reliable, and also because sometimes we’re bound by our clients’ existing infrastructure. The interface is unfriendly. The display is slow, you can’t see the entire desktop when you’re viewing a remote computer. If you put it in “stretch” mode, it’s terrible. I’d avoid this if I could.
  • Remote Administrator (RAdmin) - Wonderful. This is what I use personally. I love every feature about it, and would recommend it to anyone. I won’t provide the link here, because I don’t feel like linking all of this list, but do a google search; you’ll find it #1.
  • UltraVNC - A wonderful remote display application. We use this to access our software’s client workstations. This is to say that the VNC Server is installed on my software’s clients. Once we’ve got a remote desktop connection to our server, we’ll use that connection to setup a VNC connection to our clients.

The last bullet point starts to explain the problems I have with remote administration. I have to follow these steps in order to access a site’s client workstations:

  1. Open VPN Software/Website
  2. Login/Confirm that I agree with the privacy/security for this site.
  3. Starte/Login to a Remote Desktop connection with my server (or use PCAnywhere - we’ll get back to this one)
  4. Open a VNC connection to the remote machine.
  5. Work on the issue/upgrade.

When doing VNC or RAdmin, it’s important to note that the hook is in the display driver, which means you’ll be able to see everything the current user (sitting at that machine locally) is doing. If you’re in “full-control” mode, when you move the mouse, you’ll be moving it for that other person too. With Remote Desktop, you get your own session, so this isn’t a problem.

When I’m using PCAnywhere, I’ve already got a window inside of a window open, just to view the desktop. It’s the PCAnywhere window, with options, etc… Then inside, I have the window which is showing me the server. The server’s display is wider and taller than the PCAnywhere window, so there are scrollbars. To view a client, I need to open a VNC session from inside the server window, which is inside the PCAnywhere window. Since the client I run is a dual-screen application, the VNC window will be bigger than the server window, so the VNC window will also have scrollbars. Now I have four sets of scrollbars to manage each time I want to view a different part of the client’s display. Since my workstations are in use all day, when I do a VNC connection, I need to call the site, tell them I’m about to do work, and to leave the workstation alone until I’m done. Sucks, right? Yup.

So my advice is this: Avoide doing remote administration unless you have to. It’s cumbersome, and if you  have VPN -> Remote Desktop - VNC/RAdmin/PCAnywhere,  you’ll just get frustrated. If you do have to VPN/Remote, stick with Microsoft and RAdmin. RAdmin is nice because it lets you do telnet/view only/full control/file transfer. And you know you’ll need to port files out at some point.