Remote Control
Microsoft's Remote Desktop
Enabling it on the target machine
- Goto Start | My Computer | context menu | Properties | Remote
- Check Allow users to connect remotely to this computer
- Click Ok and it should be enabled
Security Notes
- It serves the connection on port 3389 by default
- It is best to keep that port shut on your firewall/router, and use ssh port forwarding to access RemoteDesktop
- On WinXP with Service Pack 2, you open the ssh tunnel to the target machine with an alternate port [in this example 9833], then with RemoteDesktop connect to
localhost:9833.
- Example ssh tunnel command (run on the machine you want to remote administer from):
ssh -N -L 9833:localhost:3389 Username@targetmachineAddress
Other Notes
- It your current username, password, and/or domain are different: you will need to enter the correct values for the target machine in RemoteDesktop
- If your are connecting to a target machine that is in a workgroup (not in a domain), just clear out the domain field
- If you try to connect to a machine and get this error (and you know everything about the connection is correct):
The client could not connect to the remote computer
This command may make it start working again ipconfig /flushdns
TightVNC
Homepage is: http://www.tightvnc.com/
Example Settings for a really slow connection
- On Viewer: Tight compression
- On Viewer: Screen and jpeg compression set to 6
- On Viewer: 8-bit color to get a little extra boost
- For screen refreshes, on the server enable poll full screen
It looks like docs from WinVNC (aka RealVNC) are mostly compatible.
So try out limiting which hosts have access to the server.
How to do this can be found at: http://www.realvnc.com/winvnc.html
Remote Control of a PC