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Desktop Sharing
No, it's not a new form of corporate downsizing, it's networking at its best!
There comes a time in everybody's life when they wish they were able to
access their computer from another location. For the more technical
people amongst us this can lead to all sorts of complex VPN and RRAS
connections, but there is a much simpler way - Remote desktop Sharing. Put
simply, remote desktop sharing means that you can use a computer (that
is connected to the internet) to remotely control another computer
(also connected to the internet). The screen of the computer you wish
to connect to is displayed on your screen, just as if you were sitting
in front of it. The
benefits of remote desktop sharing in fields such as computer support
and remote operability are huge. It's helpful for business people on
the road. They can simply access their office computer (and all the
information on it) from any public internet kiosk, WiFi notebook, or
soon even java enabled phones! It's
also helpful for PC support. I you frequently need to configure remote
computers or just help other users out, desktop sharing can save time
driving to and from the site and also fuel costs and even pollution. Desktop
sharing can also help if you have more than one computer in your office
or home. You can access the other computer as if you were siting in
front of it, even if it's in another room, down the corridor or in the
garage - all without moving from your favourite chair. Desktop
sharing will work with Local Area Networks (LANs) even better than it
works on the internet. On a reasonably fast LAN screen updates are
smooth (more than 30 frames a second) and timely and on a particularly
fast LAN (gigabit) it's hard to see the difference! If
you have a WiFi notebook and network you'll find plenty of use for
Desktop sharing. Your notebook can take on the software and
functionality of all the other PCs on your network (great for
administering your server from the pub!) Desktop
Sharing can help you solve common problems. Consider this example; you
have a notebook and a desktop computer connected to your ADSL modem.
You collect your email on your desktop computer (and you have quite a
bit) and you want to be able to access this mail as well as send and
receive email from your notebook. Normally
you could just set up a second email client on the notebook and then
you can send and receive email. But what about your email store on the
desktop PC, how do you access your previously received messages, sent
items and contacts? You
could export all the information from your email client and then import
this into your notebooks email client. But it will be hard to
synchronise the two email clients in future if you send and receive
email from both computers. You could look at an email synchronisation
utility such as SyncPST (for Microsoft Outlook) but i must warn you
that they're usually slow and have a tendency to crash all the time! The other thing that I haven't mentioned is that as WiFi speeds are not all they're cracked up to be,
If you try and share your PST files or even copy them across your WiFi
link you're in for a long haul, sit back and grab a coffee. Now
if you were to set up a desktop sharing client on the notebook and
connected to your desktop, you can access all your email and contacts,
you can send and receive emails and they're all still stored on the
desktop computer - there's no need to synchronise! You'll also find
that because you're only copying the screen from your desktop to your
notebook that your network usage stays fairly low - we recommend
dropping the Updates per second down to about 30 frames per second. One
word of caution though. If you are connecting to a computer via the
internet and you don't have an "unlimited" internet connection then you
could unwittingly charge up some hefty usage bills if you left a pc
connected remotely for a long time. Whilst the PC's as either end may
not actually be doing anything, the screen will be continuously copied
between the pc's. Think of it this way, if you are watching a
tickertape film of a still scene, then you are seeing many 'images' of
the same picture played in sequence. These 'images' all add up to data
being continuously transferred through your internet connection while
you are connected to the remote computer - whether you are using it or
not! There
are a few popular 3rd party desktop sharing programs as well as the
obligatory basic Microsoft version built into windows XP and Windows
2003. We look at popular solutions from Famatech, AT&T and
Microsoft. AT&T Labs VNC AT&T
Labs developed the worlds first desktop sharing program back around
1988 and it's still available today (vastly upgraded) in the form of
RealVNC. RealVNC is a commercial implementation of the VNC protocol. As
with most Desktop Sharing programs , VNC consists of two parts, the VNC
server which is installed on the computer you wish to connect to and
the VNC client which is installed on the computer you are connecting
from.  VNC
is extremely portable, you can install the server and client on many
operating systems such as Linux x86, Solaris 2.5, Windows
9x/2k/NT/ME/CE/XP/2003, Macintosh 68k & PPC, DEC Alpha SH3 &
MIPS VNC's
processor and memory usage is tiny compared to other desktop sharing
programs such as Microsoft NetMeeting or PC Anywhere. If your operating
system is not listed, you can even download the source code and compile
it to suit your own platform (not for the faint-hearted) The
VNC client is tiny which makes it easy to carry around on a floppy,
memory stick or even in your webmail box, you can quickly find and run
the client and remotely access your computer. Because the client
doesn't need to be installed on the PC (windows only) you can run it
without having administrator access. This is great for university
students who wish to access their computers at home or business
travellers in internet cafes as they often don't have the rights to
install software, modify the registry or even save data permanently to
the hard drive.  You
can even run VNC server in a web browser mode and you can connect
directly to your computer's desktop using only a web browser (great for
tough firewalls and the like) For
enthusiasts you can even run the VNC server as a service in Windows,
meaning you don't have to log into your computer in order for the
remote access server to start - great if you have a power cut and the
computer you want to connect to has rebooted. Because
of VNC's portability there's nothing stopping you running the Linux VNC
server and remote controlling it from a Windows or Macintosh Client or
visa-versa. VNC has a free version available - In
a world where we are all used to Adware software, it's comforting to
see absolutely no advertising, usage statistics collection, nag screens
or anything! AT&T
Labs recommend that you implement SSH to make VNC more secure and we
also recommend you download the latest version and use a very long,
non-English password. But wait - there's more! TightVNC
is a free public implementation of the VNC protocol specially designed
with speed and security in mind. If you do choose vnc for your desktop
sharing, we recommend using TightVNC if you will be connecting to
remote computers through the internet rather than just the local LAN. FamaTech Remote Administrator  Straight up, I should say that if you intend to remotely access computers that are not running Microsoft Windows then this is not
the program for you. If you are only using it in a windows environment
then it has some features that you can really benefit from. RemoteAdmin
can run as a Windows Service. If you are using Windows then RemoteAdmin
can interface directly with the SAM (security) database meaning that
you don't have to create new accounts for each user. Famatech's
RemoteAdmin can also bind directly to a certain interface and port on
your computer. This gives an added layer of security because it will
only listen for connections on a certain interface; i.e. your network
card and not your modem. This effectively screens anyone trying to
hijack your server from the internet. (if you set it up this way) RemoteAdmin
is shareware and comes with a 30 day trial version. After that time you
will no longer be able to use the package. A registered version costs
US $45.00 and is well worth it. For
those of you out there who run more than one computer; a new monitor is
probably going to cost you AUD $150 where as a registered copy of
remote administrator will cost only AUD $45. If you don't have a spare
monitor for the server this can be a great solution. Microsoft Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop Microsoft offer two solutions; Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance. Remote
Assistance works in much the same way as the software described above,
however Remote Assistance is pretty annoying to use. In order to
connect to a computer you must have first been issued an invitation.
This invitation is sent Through MSN Messenger, email or a Webpage and
while I guess this makes Remote Assistance fairly secure - it's a pain
to use and not recommended. Remote
desktop is a little different - Remote Desktop lets you log into the
computer as a separate user (in a separate session) with what's on the
screen and all your running applications being hidden from the Remote
Desktop server's screen. This feature is very very handy if you intend
on having more than one remote user connected to the computer at a
time. Back
in my student days we used to use Desktop sharing to connect to our
development server off-campus. This was fine as long as none of the
other group members logged in at the same time, if they did then you
would instantly be logged out. This lead to a couple of headaches which
wouldn't have happened if we were able to use the Windows Remote
Desktop. Microsoft Remote Desktop
Rating: 
 Remote Desktop Client for Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000
Instructions for setting up Remote Desktop RealVNC
Rating: 
VNC web site
AT&T Laboratories Caimbridge RemoteAdmin
Rating: 
Famatech website
Download RemoteAdmim Our
personal preference goes to Famatech's RemoteAdmin, however if you're
using more than one platform then we recommend RealVNC.
Vijay (Friday, 14 March 2008)
Its Good | RZ (Wednesday, 16 April 2008)
Thanks for helpful article |
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