Being the tech support choice person in my family can be burdensome and so I'm contemplating having family members make use of some kind of remote desktop application. However, I'm wondering what my best choices are with a view to using open source and (where possible) portable software. I'm thinking of making use of some flavor of VNC however I'm wondering what the limitations are on the portable aspect of them. I'm guessing that admin rights are pretty much a must, and possibly "drivers" of some kind might be involved on the server side, so portability there is pretty much out. I don't care if something has to be installed on family members' machines, that's not a big deal. So, I'm left with portable options for the client.
I've looked at TightVNC, and there is already an official portable version but their site says that the launcher itself is not open source, even though the base app is, which rightly or wrongly I find a little troubling. I know of Ultra and Real VNC, but I don't know if they are open source or come with restrictions.
I see *VNC all over this site but most, if not all the posts seem very old.
It's looking like Windows Remote Desktop is only a valid option for XP Professional users, so that could be an issue. I'm struggling to come up with ideas. Any direction people can give would be much appreciated.
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https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/teamviewer_portable
It's pretty easy to use, and we have an official version here.
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
I 100% agree with solanus on this one. Have used this for both personal and for business. Very easy to walk even the least computer savy users through setup.
I'm just a little gun-shy of proprietary apps. Maybe I'll give it a go though. Are there restrictions on usage time, or anything like that? I'm not going to get cut off after 2 hours of usage am I? Or have to upgrade after 30 days.
used to be kind of time limited, that means it did drop the connection after some time, how long I cold not find out, it seemed different each time. ometimes it worked 10 minutes, sometimes 1h.
But I was told that the portable version of the current one does not drop the connection even after hours, so just give it a try.
Yes it is proprietary, but there are few more similar apps, thought teamviewer is well known and probably also has reasonable servers dimensioned for the load expected and this is more important.
It calls the servers on port80, replay comes on ususal ports like if it was webserver so little problems with firewalls etc. So you do not install a server yourself on the system. The communication is supposed to be SSL so can be rather safe, well suppose the operator of the server could play man in the middle, so also this is nothing for high security networks.
But at my previous work, we used it also for support on networks of big banks and similar.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
What about Logmein. It installs a client on the desktop of the computer you want to remote control and you can access any of the computers through just a web browser. Chrome works best because it uses flash for the interface. The only thing is, is that it is not open source but I don't know if that is a big issue. The free version works great.
www.logmein.com
S.O.G.
sucks.
Its WAY too CPU intensive and it loads at about half the speed at TeamViewer. Plus you have to install something to the computer to use and thus it is not portable.
There's no need for any drivers to be installed with VNC; the video hook driver is an extra which isn't required. (In fact, I've just turned it off on a connection with a 2000 host and 7 client as it was drawing things very badly with it, and of all the options I tried fiddling with, turning off the video hook driver improved it the most. Illogical.)
You should be able to get, for example, UltraVNC client and server running portably. I believe (but am not certain) that WinVNC (the server part of UltraVNC) doesn't require admin, and the client doesn't require admin.
There's an important fundamental difference between the way VNC and TeamViewer work; with VNC, a connection to the computer is required (direct or VPN). In general this means that due to firewalls you can't just connect to anywhere in the world. TeamViewer, however, is OK for remote support because all activity is sent through the TeamViewer server. Thus with the client and host both having asked to connect to the TeamViewer server, firewalls don't complain. The result of this is that the connection will work from all over the world, but in my experience, it's slower (painfully slow one time I've used it). So if you can use VNC (if you have a direct network connection or VPN connection) you will almost certainly find it works better. If you don't, however, use TeamViewer.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Like you, I am the guy everyone in my family calls for computer help. I have set up TeamViewer on most of their computers and it has always worked fine. I have never had a connection dropped, or any trouble connecting. I used it to help my grandmother install a video player this very afternoon.
"My dear Mr Gyrth, I am never more serious than when I am joking."
~Albert Campion
Thanks to everybody for the feedback/suggestions/comments so far, it's been helpful. I've played briefly with TeamViewer on one of their test servers and I'm reasonably impressed. The one thing that perhaps could be an issue as far as alternatives like VNC go, and which Chris sort of confirmed is the issue of setup and configuration.
I have to keep in mind, that the reason I'm helping family members is that because they can't help themselves (not enough technical know-how) so if I have mess around trying to help them configure firewalls, routers and what-not the battle is already half lost.
So with that in mind, TeamViewer is looking like a viable option, so long as it's not "crippleware", and mostly usable from a speed standpoint. I still have some reservations, but I suppose if you don't try you don't know.