The other day I was playing around with some stuff in my home lab
(which is nothing extravagent- a couple of old AMD K6-2 based
machines, one of which is my domain controller, a couple of real old
486 based machines, and my main machine which is a PIII-866) when I
decided that I needed a remote control software for what I was
doing. Now, I love things that are free and I had heard of VNC
Viewer by AT&T labs, but had never used it. Before spending
a bunch of money on PCAnywhere, which I have used, I decided to give
VNC Viewer a whirl. I loved it, and with its cross-platform capabilities, I
don't see why I would need PCAnywhere anymore. This article is a
description of the problem that I ran into and how I solved it with
VNC Viewer, along with a quick tutorial on using VNC Viewer on
Windows.
This software could be very handy if you have servers that need to
be controlled remotely. Also, imagine what your help desk could do
if they could remotely administer users' machines rather than relying
on descriptions of problems from users who have no idea what is
going on, what you need to know, and probably do not care. Since VNC
Viewer uses its own password, seperate from logon passwords, you
would not even be compromising users' machines to your help desk;
that is unless your users leave their machines on and their accounts
logged on.....
Read on and Enjoy!!
Best Wishes,
Jay
Let me start by explaining what led up to me having a need for some
type of remote control software. I was over at my favorite little
hardware store when I noticed a used RealMagic DVD hardware decoder
on the shelf for $10. I could not pass that up, especially since I
have a couple of machines at home, in my lab, that have DVD drives
and out in my living room I have a "big-screen" television that I
wanted to watch DVDs on. I had tried software rendering with a
Ge-Force II with TV outs. I was not at all satisfied with the
software rendering nor the output of the video card, to say the
least. I went home and installed the new DVD card and was tickled by
the results.
I only had one problem; all of the on-screen controls for the DVD
player software were in the other room on the monitor. OK, I could
live with that except that there is also an on screen menu when you
begin playing the DVD that is output to the television and not the
monitor. Since the card is a hardware decoder, it will only utilize
its own outputs and will not output to the video card. (Yes, I could
get a KVM, but isn't that going overboard?) The on-screen menu is
easy to maneuver around, if you can see it, which I could not.
I already had CAT5 running out to the living room so that I could
still share network resources on my laptop while watching television
(pretty pathetic, huh?), so I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice
to remotely control the machine with the DVD player from my
laptop?" Now, before you say anything, yes this is more work than
just going out and buying a DVD player to set on top of the
television, but where is the fun in that?
Now, here at eZined.com, I take care of another newsletter,
LinuxWebmasterFree, which features freeware. (If you haven't seen it
yet, check it out here.) Where I am
going with this is that, not long ago, I featured a software by AT&T
labs known as VNC Viewer. It is very much like PCAnywhere with two
exceptions: it is free, and it is cross-platform. Yes, it works not
only with Windows, but Mac OS and Linux/Unix also. It is commercial
quality and very well documented and I have yet to use a quarter of
the features that it has. To get started, go get VNC viewer here.
You do have to
fill out a small questionare to download it.
There are actually two parts of the software; there is a server,
which is the machine whose display you will be viewing, and a client
which, for Windows, is a tiny executable which is the program that
you use from the remote machine in order to view the display of the
server.
|
It easily fits on a floppy, so that you can carry the client
with you anywhere in the office and run it off of any machine
without having to do any type of installation.
OK, so you have obtained the zipped file. Go ahead and unzip it into
its own folder. You will notice that in that folder there are two
folders, vncviewer and winvnc. The vncviewer folder contains the
client executable that I had mentioned previously (the one that fits
on a floppy). The winvnc folder contains the setup executable and
files required to install the whole package on your machine. This
installation installs all of the server componenets and all of the
client components.
In the case of the help desk, as previously mentioned, all of the
users machines in the network (that you would want to administer
remotely) would have to have the complete installation from the
winvnc folder.
|
"PGP Security
Professional Services is ready to assist you during
all stages of network growth, from
planning and design
, through implementation, and
with ongoing management."
|
The only configuration that needs to be made on the server is to
start the program and enter a password. You start the program by
going to Start-> VNC-> Run VNCViewer. VNC Viewer will not activate
without a password, which is a nice feature. This way your machines
are not totally vulnerable. VNC Viewer will make connections by
NetBIOS name, IP address, and FQDN (fully qualified domain name; ie.
mycomputer.mydomain.net).
To connect to your server, all that you have to do is run the
VNCViewer executable. It will prompt you for the server name and,
once that is entered, the password. Once connected, you will be able
to see and use the desktop just as if you were sitting there (unless
the "disable remote keyboard and pointing device" option was
selected on the options page). That is all there is to it.
You say, "Great, but is it in the least bit secure?" I asked myself
the same thing, and since I had noticed that NetBIOS names worked to
establish a connection, and since I know that by default NetBIOS
sends unencrypted passwords accross the network, I decided to do a
little packet sniffing while making a connection to my VNC server.
Guess what? I did not see a single password. What this means to a
network administrator is that if you just want to view some files on
another machine, it is more secure than using "NET USE". (For more
information on "NET USE", go here.)
The only drawback that I saw with the whole program was the
inability to transfer files. There are enough free FTP clients and
servers out on the Internet that were designed just for file
transfer so that that should not be a factor in deciding to use
VNCViewer. All in all, I thought this was a great little program,
especially since I did not have to go out and buy PCAnywhere.
I hope you all enjoyed this article!! If any of you have a
suggestions for articles that you would like to see in upcoming
issues of NetworkNewz, let me know. Also, anyone who has written any
network related articles that you would like to see published, send
them to me. Thank you all for reading NetworkNewz!!
We at the Editorial Team would like to thank all our readers for
reading NetworkNewz. We hope you find this information useful. Also,
questions, suggestions and comments are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Jay Fougere
NetworkNewz Editor
|
