OT- Remote PC Access...???

Stuart Ablett

Member
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Tokyo Japan
With the upcoming trip to Canada on the horizon, I'm thinking about investing in one of these "remote access" programs.

Two that I've read up a bit on are PC Anywhere and GoToMyPC.

I'm leaning towards the GoToMyPC because I've been rather unhappy with various Symantec products over the years :-X

Does anyone use these products and can steer me in the right direction?

Basically what I want, is to be able to access the various files etc on our PCs here in Japan, while I'm in Canada on vacation, just in case.

Cheers!
 
Stu - no comment on those products but I am a very happy user of logmein - (www.logmein.com). They have a free product that enables control of a remote PC and for a reasonabe (to me anyway) cost you can add things like file transfer and remote printing.

Hope that helps
 
Stuart:

I highly recommend logmein.com. I use it everyday in my work. I can control all of the front desk computers in our clinics with it. I have had no problems. As I write this I am sending it through my computer near Detroit Michigan from Lima Peru. Good luck.
 
Well I downloaded it, and this program does something that I really really have a pet peeve about, it asks me what country I'm in, so I say Canada, as I know, I just KNOW that it will try to download the Japanese version of the software.......... and it did.......... :doh:

Sure, once I install it, I can go and change the language setting, but I have to do the complete install with various security alerts in Japanese, I can muddle through them, but what happens if I were in say Greece and this happened? I cannot for the life of me understand WHY this happens, if I can choose the country that I am in, or based in, why does the software download in the language of the country I'm currently present in???

Sorry, just something that makes me go :bang:

:dunno:
 
Yeah - at the very least they should ask what country are you in to do things like time zone, currency, etc. but then also ask what language for install. I'm sure there's at least one or two other blokes like Stu in Japan who live there and do business there but who speak Japanese as a second language.

Where in Canada are you going to be?

And why did you want to use your Porter Cable tools remotely? Wouldn't that be dangerous? :huh: :wave: :rofl:
 
And why did you want to use your Porter Cable tools remotely? Wouldn't that be dangerous? :huh: :wave: :rofl:

Nah, it should be safer as long as he padlocks the door of the dungeon so no one can get in.

My wife uses GoToMyPC at work and I use GoToMeeting at work. Both are work great and very stable. I've used PCAnywhere in the past for work. I've seen it make a machine unstable, like other Symantec products. If you are using Windows XP Pro (or if you are running one of the Sever products), you already have remote control software built in. You would need to open/forward port 3389 on your firewall though. I've done that in the past without problems. There's even a way to log in to the console and ability to attach to another session for shared access. We do that at work quite a bit.

DO NOT USE VNC! VNC is not even close to secure for access across the Internet. I accidentally left one of my PCs in the DMZ on my router and then installed VNC. Someone tried to take control of it while I was using it. I've heard that elsewhere too. Now inside my own network I love VNC except that it has an issue with XP Home when multiple users are logged in.
 
Don't forget to verify IP addresses and set up IP forwarding as needed before you go.

I don't know how many documents you need to look at or how secure they need to be, but would Google documents be a quick idea?
 
DO NOT USE VNC! VNC is not even close to secure for access across the Internet.

We used to use VNC at work, a few years ago, and the way to set it up back then was to tunnel VNC over SSH. Of course, VNC came out of a research/academic environment, where people would not go cross-eyed :dunno: when you suggest that they "tunnel over SSH". :huh:

And to the guy who suggested Linux... I might point out that Macs are a bit more user-accessible, and they also support remote access right out of the box. (and yes, I am writing this on Linux right now, but I know better than to suggest that to Windows users. Of course, I bought my wife a Mac... :rolleyes: Hey, I thought Stu wanted a Mac also?)
 
Have you thought about using Remote Desktop? The server part comes standard with XP pro. And I believe the client is installed on XP home. I use it all the time to access my computer here at work from home. Why has no one mention this yet? Seems like the perfect solution. No cost, it's already installed!, so ya don't have to install the Japanese version.
 
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I use the inbuilt Remote Desktop on my XP boxes. I haven't set things up to access my home PC from work, but I am usually connected to at least two different work machines when I'm at home.
 
I tried the "Logmein" thing last night, sent some e-mail from the L shop machine via the remote control on the home machine, sure was easy to do :thumb:

I've only got one machine that run XP Pro, the others are all Win 2K Pro. I'm told that I can get the download for 2K Pro, so I might look into that.

Art, our next machine will be a Mac! :thumb:

Cheers!
 
Stu,

Without getting into religious wars ( ;) ) RDP is probably your best bet. Watch out for firewall settings, though: we've turned off all incoming remote requests, no matter what OS or what protocol. Just way too many hack and scan attempts. Most U's on this side of the pond are doing the same thing. It leads to interesting problems for researchers. Say one of our guys wants to remote with his colleague at ucla. He can call out to ucla, but they won't let him in. His friend at ucla can call out to him, but we won't let the friend in. We end up doing a lot of one-off tunnels. ;)

There have been some pretty good exploits over the last couple years in this area. Don't trust the "oh, I use X, it's better than Y" brand of advice ;) If the national supercomputing center can get hit, so can you, even if you think you're using the best system.

Now, after all that, are you *sure* it's worth allowing remote connections to your machine? For convienence? Just in case? ;)

Thanks,

Bill
(who spent yesterday at the Internet2 security conference, and came back with all sorts of horror stories! ;) But I did have lunch with the information security officer at the school where one of our members just had a son accepted... ;)

.
 
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Stu:

Before leaving, you might want to try taking your laptop to some public WiFi environment to verify that things work.

To give myself the illusion of security I'd make a dummy account to try this with.

This way you can make sure that any IP / firewall issues are good to go since you're definitely on an outside network.

Happy traveling!
 
OK Bill, you are freaking me out :eek:

Then again, I'm not a "Target" like you friend's institution is...... :dunno:

Mark, the Laptop does have a WiFi card, but at my parent's house in Canada, I'll be plugged into their LAN, not WiFi.

I tired the LogMeIn.com thing last night from the house tot he L shop, worked like a charm, dead easy to do.

Mostly, I need to access files, and mail, so if customer e-mails us while we are on vacation, I can deal with, it, with out having the MIL phone my parents house at 4 AM......... like she did TWICE the last time we all went to Canada....... :doh: :bang:

I'll also have my phone cell phone set up to call forward to my Skype account.

Cheers!
 
Stu

I have used LogMeIn from everywhere. Hotels in the states - coffee shops in Australia, a bakery in New Zealand and many many PC's in the UK. I have never had to monkey with any settings. As far as security, if I was using my home machine to run a strategic missile defence system or manage an international payments network then I would probably worry. But I'm not so I don't. I have set up the password bits on LMI and kept things relatively crypyic. I am sure that a hacker who was sufficiently motivated could find out how many chairs I sold last year but if he phoned me up I would tell him anyway:)
 
Canada EH!

Welcome back to BC and Canada Stu
In the backwoods here, when you say "log me in", usually you're running a chainsaw into a tree, looking for an escape route, when it goes "timber". I'll try this software, however its pretty tough lugging the desktop computer around.
Give us a holler if you come by Golden. (I warn you my woodturner not working, unless you bring your own crank).
Cheers
Irv
 
Canada EH!

Thanks for the reply, enjoy your trip, however, spring is late, we still have snow on the ground here, and the golfing only opened May 1, about 3 weeks later than usual. Test the water first, before jumping in lake Ok.
Cheers
 
Stu:

If you can remote login from a local wifi point it will demonstrate that your home network is properly setup to accept incoming traffic like you want to do. It would suck to get to BC and find out that some small router configuration is not correctly setup and you can't access your home network from outside.

From the testing you described earlier, it was not clear whether it was from an outside network or just remote login from a different computer on your home network.

Hope everything goes smoothly for you!
 
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