Why don’t we have an open source peer to peer remote control tool?
Yes, that’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. Bare with me. After Logmein delivered a huge blow to occasional remote access users everywhere, I’ve been thinking about the state of Remote Control tools. I’m not saying this to list all the different options there are, and gosh there are many; but to look at what has made Logmein and similar tool, Teamviewer, become so powerful.
The one common ingredient with Logmein and Teamviewer are the ability to punch through firewalls and effectively remove the need for time-wasting port configuration. Logmein does go further by providing online status and other “Pro” features, but the big and valuable feature of these two utilities is in firewall traversal. If you’re a VNC, or Remote Desktop or Radmin user, you’re likely familiar with the two-step process of opening a port, creating a gateway server and connecting. This keeps your need to open the network to a minimum while allowing access to all systems internally. Why don’t we have an open source equivalent to this kind of tool?
As the “IT Guy”, you’ll wear many hats. One of those hats involve handling crashed computers or software. Often, there are smaller configuration changes that need to be done and you really would be best served to not go to the customer for these issues. No doubt that if you’ve been in the industry for a while, you know that there are Remote Access options out there – but I’m going to go deeper and give you an idea of what is your best remote access setup.
Over the years I have seen my fair share of these products, no one application or option suits every scenario, but if you want the best, cheapest remote access options available today, here’s what you should be using.