Anthony DOUANN, 123RF

Remote Desktop with UltraVNC

Windshield Wiper

Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By Thomas Drilling

A bunch of remote access tools for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows are based on the VNC protocol. We show you why UltraVNC is the best of the bunch.

Netviewer, TeamViewer, pcvisit, Radmin, BeamYourScreen, Mikogo, Copilot, ShowMyPC, LogMeIn Rescue – the imaginative names of today's crop of remote control software suggest individuality and technological uniqueness. In fact, they all do more or less the same thing.

The sheer number of remote control solutions for Windows is indicative of either a seemingly huge market for easy-to-handle, powerful, and secure remote control programs or the ease with which these kinds of applications can be developed because the protocols and standards they use are freely available. Marketing departments have put huge efforts into marketing their products as desktop sharing software for online meetings, presentations, remote support, web conferencing, and so on.

In all cases, software of this kind needs to display a computer's desktop over the LAN or the Internet and pass mouse movements and keyboard input through. In individual cases, advanced features also pass the hardware attached to the remote server through or support convenient file transfer operations. Depending on the solution, the server and clients have clear roles, whether they are available as separate programs or are combined in a tool that can handle both, and this difference in turn defines the usage philosophy.

Remote Control Solutions

Many of the available solutions additionally support browser-based web access, either as a built-in feature or via plugins, with no clear-cut borders. In remote control scenarios, users requiring help share their desktop with an expert, who then takes control of the client. On the other hand, the expert can use his or her own computer as a server for displaying and demonstrating interactions on the client screen. In another conceivable deployment scenario, the administrator is given GUI-based, and thus convenient, access to multiple servers, virtual machines, or

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