Thanks Brett.
I intend to use the remote access as guidance also i.e. telling the user over the phone and then showing with the mouse etc so it will need to be visible to the customer.
The setup is basic and will consist of 3 XP boxes protected by a netgear ADSL firewall router that does DHCP, NAT etc. I am upgrading the BT account so I can have three static IP addresses and create static routes using the netgear box. They do not have any other servers and stuff, I like to keep the setup simple as this reduces support overheads.
I read up a little on VNC, the data it sends for updates etc is unencrypted but would need a very sophisticated eavesdropper to reassemble the mangled frame buffer update data, the only useful data for a cracker would be the keystrokes I would be sending as they are all unencrypted. As long as I am aware of the data I send I think I may be able to make the Free Edition work quite well, at least until RealVNC Personal for Linux is released!
Brett Parker wrote:
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David Simon Cooper david.cooper@uea.ac.uk wrote:
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I have considered the security implications. To make things safer with the Free Edition I could just put an icon on their desktop and ask them to run the user mode app whenever they want me to connect, this would mean the server is only running when they want stuff fixed, they could close it when stuff is done, very safe. I would of course have the "ask for permission" option enabled on VNC for security reasons.
Do you folks have any views on this?
Right - does what you're doing need to be visible to the customer? If you're just fixing things, it may be better to use rdesktop to connect to Win XPs terminal services. It tends to be a little quicker than VNC, and, from what I can remember it is encrypted. So, a small bit of Free Software (http://www.rdesktop.org/) for the client on the Linux box, and then just enabling Terminal Services on the server box.
Cheers,
Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
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