Remote Connection and Assistance RoundupPosted by Andy Atkinson on December 28, 2005 | Post type: Gain This article is written as a follow-up to my previous article on UltraVNC where many visitors commented with suggestions for software they use for remote connection and remote assistance. Most users are connecting through routers and NATs (explained below), so they may not be able to forward ports on the remote router. If you are providing remote assistance, the remote user, a family member or friend, might be incapable of forwarding ports on the router. Furthermore, you might want the remote screen to show your mouse movements and keystrokes so the user requiring assistance can get help in realtime. This "roundup" article compares 6 different applications, all which may be used and evaluated for free in some capacity, and some which have very generous free versions. In addition to UltraVNC SC which is open source, I'll cover, LogMeIn and its derivatives, Fog Creek Copilot, WebEx PCNow, Remote Support System, and Remote PC. Click "read more" to learn about these applications, including screenshots, and pricing information, as well as a brief introduction to firewalls, and network address translation.
UltraVNC SC (Single Click) is a twist on UltraVNC, where instead of connecting to a server directly, the user who wants to share his/her desktop initiates the connection request outward. The following description comes from the UltraVNC SC page: UltraVNC SC is a mini (166k) UltraVNC Server that can be customized and preconfigured for download by a customer. UltraVNC SC does not require installation and does not make use of the registry. The customer only has to download the little executable and click to make a connection. The connection is initiated by the server, to allow easy access through the customer's firewall. Translation? With this version of UltraVNC, you can traverse a NAT without forwarding ports on your router. This version is still free and likely will be even easier to use if you want to help out a friend of family member with their computer. If you need more information on NAT and port forwarding, keep reading. A complete tutorial on using UltraVNC is planned for a future article. Brief Background on NAT and FirewallsWhy is it important to traverse a NAT and a firewall? Going into detail about Network Address Translation (NAT) is beyond the scope of this article, but here are the basics. Computers that are connected to a network have an IP address. When the network is private, like a home network behind a wireless or wired router, the IP addresses the machines have will most likely be "private" IP addresses (RFC1918). However these private addresses cannot connect to the Internet. You must instead be using a public address. This is where NAT comes in, it translates your private address using one of the available port numbers in a router, to a public address, so it knows how to send and receive packets that are sent from or destined to your computer. In the first guide to using UltraVNC, I had you open up ports (a.k.a. "Port Forwarding") on your router. This might be difficult or impossible for you to do on the remote machine for a number of reasons. If you don't have physical access to the remote network, it will be difficult to open up ports on the remote router. UltraVNC SC switches it up by letting you open up the ports on your own router and letting the remote user connect to your machine by downloading a very small executable from the Internet. You don't even have to host the file on one of your own servers since you could put the EXE file on a free account with FTP access, and provide the username and password to your friends or clients.
Customizing UltraVNC SCUltraVNC SC gives you a text file that you can use to customize the interface of the EXE your friends or family might download, as well as allow you to customize icons and colors. Customizing the service is not necessary, however customers would certainly feel better about connecting to a remote machine if the program they are using matches the look and feel of your business. Customization instructions can be found on the UltraVNC SC page. At a bare minimum, you will need to put in the public, routable IP address of your machine, and the port you want remote users to connect through to your machine on. The default port is 5500, but you can use any port number that is not already defined. I recommend using something above 10,000, just remember that the port you open on your router must match the port number you put into the "helpdesk.txt" text file. I also had to open up port 5900 on my router before I could complete a connection. If you do not choose to install UltraVNC as a service, you will have to open up ports on your Windows XP firewall as well. I had trouble getting the plugin working that is supposed to be used to provide encryption. I downloaded the UltraVNC 1.0.1 release and installed the Viewer and the DSM security plug-in, I did not install the Server. Even though I chose to install the DSM security plugin, it was not available when I launched the viewer, instead it kept displaying a message like "Check plugin integrity." So I downloaded the plugin from the webpage directly, and placed it in the Once the files you want customized are ready to go, you will need to create your own ZIP file. In Windows XP you can read ZIP files, but you can't create them. For that you will need to download WinZip. At the time I was ready to create my custom EXE file, the creation website was down. I posted the problem to the UltraVNC forum, and was given this alternate url http://sc.uvnc.com/cgi-bin/upload3.pl to create the EXE. In a future article, I will write a full tutorial on how to customize the EXE, where to host it for free, and how you can use it to help friends and family, or commercially, by providing assistance to remote users. The screenshot below shows the customized EXE installer I created in about 15 minutes. For now, this article should give you a feel for the capability of the software and hopefully inspires you to try it out and give me feedback.
LogMeInLogMeIn has a variety of services, categorized into "Personal Remote Access" and "Remote Support Solutions". In the case of the "IT Reach" version, there is a similar process as with UltraVNC SC where an administrator would log-in and create a link that would be sent to remote clients. Remote client machines would accept the link, and a small program would be installed to their machine to allow local administrators to connect to a remote machine. LogMeIn has a number of services, the one I will examining is their free version appropriately named "LogMeIn Free". Another product under the LogMeIn umbrella is called RemotelyAnywhere. This product has some compelling features. I like how it automatically connects your remote printers to your local machine, so that you can send print jobs to your local printers without configuring anything. RemotelyAnywhere also supports folder synchronization, which means whether you have newer files in your local machine, or in your remote machine, both will download and upload the necessary files under the "File Transfer" module so that both folders contain identical contents. RemotelyAnywhere provides users with a control panel when they log-in that displays statistics of the remote machine, lets you manage security, and other features. There is also a chat where you can get help should you have a problem. They indicate on their website that most of the administration features you might be used to, like killing processes, stopping and starting services, etc., are available via a web browser, which they claim is better because administration can happen transparently to whatever user is currently logged-in, and is much faster over low bandwidth connections since you don't have to be logged-in to make changes. These claims have a fair amount of marketing "spin," but for a turnkey solution with robust support, RemotelyAnywhere might work for you. RemotelyAnywhere has a fully-functional 30-day free trial. The purchase prices ranges between $99 and $199 depending on your needs.
Installing LogMeIn FreeThe installation for this free software is extremely painless. You have to create an account, but then the installation consists of accepting a security certificate and clicking "Next" through a couple of wizard options. You type a name for your computer since you are allowed to have multiple machines active under your one account name. The installation happens over SSL, so everything is encrypted. Once you are ready to access your machine, you can do so through the Java utility, or there is even a Firefox plugin that you can download. If you connect using Firefox, LogMeIn will ask if you want to install the Firefox plugin. When you are logged-in, the "control panel" type of options look very easy to use, but don't present you with a whole lot of features that you couldn't get otherwise, such as synchronizing a directory with an FTP client (assuming you are running an FTP server), but the big difference is that there is little to no configuration and the GUI is very attractive. You don't need to worry about port forwarding, or NAT traversal, everything "just works." Despite support for Java, I couldn't get LogMeIn to work on Firefox or Safari in OS X 10.4, which severely limits how useful this will be for me since I would like to be able to connect to my PC from a PC, Mac, or a Linux machine. I did try to access my PC from another PC, and was able to do that using Firefox and IE. My desktop resolution is set to 1600x1200 however, which meant that screen refreshes were extremely slow. You would likely want to optimize your PC for remote connections, by lowering the screen resolution to something like 800x600, and removing unnecessary graphical elements like wallpapers and icon shadowing. LogMeIn claims that you can set these preferences for your remote connection and they will be remembered for each subsequent connection. I found it quite easy to scale resolutions, but scaling greatly reduces (or destroys) the readability of text, so I found myself switching between scaled and full resolutions, which worked well enough. In the screenshot below, I am logged-in to my desktop PC which I have setup through RemotelyAnywhere. You can see the control panel options on the left, as well as the desktop resolution scaling controls at the top. I found that the desktop scaling greatly improved performance for high-resolution displays, but it comes at the cost of readability of text. If you leave the resolution "zoom" to 100%, you might encounter some panning depending on the resolution of your local display. I would no trouble navigating back to my home PC from work, through my router running NAT. The ports I manually forwarded on my firewall were 5900 for VNC, and 3389 for Windows XP Remote Desktop Connection.
If you try the free trial of the paid version called "LogMeIn Pro," the trial only lasts for 30 days or 120 minutes, whichever comes first. I left my connection up, and blew through my 120 minute trial period accidentally. I did get a good feel for the paid version however, albeit one time, and was able to easily switch to the free version while logged-in to my account. Fog Creek CopilotFog Creek is the software company of Joel Spolsky, known in certain circles for his Joel on Software website. This past summer, his interns and supporting crew cranked out a piece of software called Copilot and made a movie about the process. While I don't have a source to link to, in an interview Joel Spolsky revealed that Fog Creek Copilot is based on VNC (Remote FrameBuffer protocol) software. The original VNC software is open source and licensed under the GNU General Public License. This software takes a different approach than UltraVNC or LogMeIn. From the front page, there are two options, you either sign-in to fix someone's computer, or you sign-in to have your computer fixed. Thus, this software is officially billed as "remote assistance" software, meaning it has the built-in "Remote Assistance" program in Windows based on the Remote Desktop Protocol to contend with. So why is this better? Copilot greatly simplifies the end user experience, which is important for less savvy users who require remote assistance. Copilot also has 128-bit SSL encryption, which is important since VNC does not offer any inherent security. Copilot is also capable of traversing firewalls since it operates over the SSL port that is almost always open by default in home and office firewalls. The most interesting features I see are that their is no registration required if you are using the "Day Pass" service, which means faster and move convenient service for both parties involved in remote assistance. You can pay for the Day Pass and other services with a PayPal account also, which might be more convenient for you and is not offered by most other services. If you want to test out Copilot, they offer a "Test Drive" that lets a helper connect to the computer requiring assistance for 2 minutes. While this is certainly not enough time to do any real work, you are able to use the software and determine if it is worth paying for, or if one of the free services mentioned in this article will suffice. WebEx PCNowWebEx is a publicly-traded software company that makes a number of applications, including one for remotely connecting to a computer called PCNow. WebEx takes a similar approach as LogMeIn where you setup the machine to which you wish to connect first, then you are able to access the remote machine you just setup through your web browser. A review at laptopmag.com indicates that WebEx PC supports more colors for the machine you are connecting to, but not surprisingly, this means that operation feels sluggish. PC World named the "Pro" version ($10 per month, $89 annually) of the software their "Best Buy," but mentions that the free version will suffice for the remote connection needs of most users. Unlike GoToMyPC (which I mention again at the end of this article), the free trial does not require that you enter a credit card at registration time. For this reason alone, I recommend PCNow over GoToMyPC because it nags you less. The account creation is trivial, and a wizard guides you through the installation of the software on the machine you want to connect to.
Once the software is installed, you will see the computers you have associated with your account. PCNOW allows you to install the service software on up to 10 computers, which might be an advantage for you depending on your needs. Unfortunately, like LogMeIn, I was not able to access my PC under OS X 10.4 with either Firefox or Safari. LogMeIn will appear to be working, but will display Java errors, while PCNow will run a "compatibility test" and inform you which browsers, versions of Java, and operating systems are supported.
PCNow has a larger file size download, around 4MB for the server machine and the "viewer" machine. I was coming in from Firefox, so I downloaded a 4MB Firefox extension. The install was rather painless, an MSI installer for Windows, and I didn't need to restart Firefox. One advantage to PCNow is that it pops-up your remote desktop in a new screen that automatically scales your remote desktop connection to match the resolution of the pop-up window. The response was laggy, but fonts and text were more readable than LogMeIn. Another option on the menu (see screenshot below) was to automatically scale the remote resolution to match the local screen resolution, this worked well. PCNow also allows you to operate with either the remote screen blank (default), or to allow the remote user to see your mouse and keyboard activity. This second option would be ideal if you are providing remote assistance.
If you are looking for free connectivity however, I recommend LogMeIn Free over PCNow, since you are limited to only a free 30-day trial of PCNow. If you are looking for a slick way to provide remote assistance to up to 10 computers however, then PCNow, as a paid solution, might work for you. Remote Support SystemDownload.com hosts the free version of Remote Support System and has rated it very highly. Remote Support System is another free (for non-commercial use), very small application that lets you create an EXE that users requiring assistance can download, to initiate connections outward. This software is more similar to UltraVNC Single Click in its approach, and does not present the GUI and online account management that WebEx PCNow or LogMeIn do. Remote Support System sports some of the standard features like file and directory transfer, and chat, and some unexpected additions like the ability to reboot the remote PC with auto-reconnect, or reboot the remote PC into safe mode with auto-reconnect. The software also allows you to generate a customizable invoice for each session automatically. Combining this last feature with the ability to reboot remote machines into safe mode are ideal features for a small remote PC support business. While the software is not free for commercial use, you can certainly try it out and determine if it meets your needs better than UltraVNC in its free version. The reviews from small business owners at download.com are very positive, and the paid version of this software is sure to offer faster and more reliable phone support than the open source UltraVNC, where support would be left up to you and likely come from forums. Remote Support System as a paid solution, starts at $349 for a company size of 1 to 4 employees (not technicians using the software, but the total number of employees in your company). As they indicate on the purchase page of their website, the initial purchase price is based on your current company size, but there are no monthly fees and you are eligible for unlimited usage once you have purchased the software. The free version will present advertising and other nuisances, but are removed if the software is purchased. The paid version also allows you to brand the software with your own company logo, much like UltraVNC SC. RemotePCRemotePC has a number of services ranging from personal use to enterprise use. RemotePC focuses more on remote data storage, file transfer, and file access to remote locations through a web browser. RemotePC uses the same 128-bit SSL encryption that many others tout, and it offers the same ability as LogMeIn to print a remote job on a local printer. In lieu of technical details on the overview page, they claim "Full Colors" and "Latency Reduction Technologies," which probably means there is "true color" support, but this ensures that the interface is slow and you will likely want to reduce the number of colors to improve the speed. There are clearly many different algorithms in use among the software mentioned in this article, but there is not a perfect balance of colors, icons, anti-aliasing of fonts and other user interface extras, balanced with speed, that will meet the needs of everyone. RemotePC offers a generous trial offer, 30 days with no time restriction (Copilot only gives you two minutes for free), but does not offer a free version like LogMeIn or an open source solution based on VNC. Pricing is reasonable though, the same as WebEx PCNow at US $9.95 per month, or (slightly more) at $99.95 annually. This even includes 5GB of remote storage, something the others in this article do not include. The biggest advantage that I see to pay for RemotePC over the others is the integration with IBackup and 5GB of online file storage and access. The "Economy Plan" for IBackup costs the same as RemotePC per month, so you are effectively getting $20 per month of services (RemotePC and IBackup) for only $10 per month if you purchase only RemotePC. 5GB will probably not be enough for all of your online photo storage, MP3s, games or whatever, but will likely be enough for your critical documents, homework, resumes, or other lightweight files. PC Magazine gave IBackup their Editor's Choice. Here is an excerpt from the review: IBackup offers all the standard features, such as scheduled backups, data compression, data encryption (on the server and in transit over the Internet), and incremental backups. It also provides some handy nonstandard features. For example, you can e-mail file attachments directly into your online storage, and you can configure an online drive to appear as a local drive. To upload and download files and folders, you use either the very intuitive IBackup for Windows application or one of three different browser-based methods offered. If you are willing to shell out some cash for a remote connection solution, RemotePC is definitely worth looking at, for the usage of IBackup alone. Summary
Additional ResourcesPC Magazine's "PC in a Browser" Article, August 2005 Another free piece of software that has received a lot of industry attention (and thus I didn't cover it here) is GoToMyPC.com. There are plenty of reviews of this software, however it only offers a 30-day free trial and requires a credit card for registration. I'm sure you can cancel within the first 30 days as they indicate on their site, but with other free alternatives that don't nag you with a credit card, why bother? If you are still interested, GoToMyPC runs the same way as WebEx PCNow and LogMeIn work, where you download a small application that runs as a service on the machine you wish to connect to. That being said, I recommend LogMeIn instead, either the free or paid version. About the author(s) Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008. Comments
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