Accessing Desktop of Stations with PC anywhere

[NicholasM]

Does anyone know if its possible to set up PC Anywhere on a small office network so that when accesssed from remote...you can see the desktop of any of the individual stations on the network.

Thinking out loud:

If I run multiple copies on each of the stations...and forward port 21 of the router to the ip address to each of the workstations..

Problem then is when accessing each station from remote...how do I distinguish one from the other....since there is only one domain name?

Stumped at this point...

All ideas appreciated...

Thanks

 

[DTSMAN]

If you are staying on a local network you can get VNC (freeware) and access desktops that way. Are you dialing in from outside the network? Then you just set up vnc on the computer you are dialing into and then VNC out to the others on the network and you can minimize them to the taskbar and have multiple ones going at the same time.

http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/download.html

 

[NicholasM]

Thanks for the feedback. I am trying to monitor a small office network remotely. It consists of a server and 4 stations...want to be able to "fix" and "trouble shoot" problems for each of the stations.

I was not familiar with VNC until you mentioned it...Is this sort of a freeware of pcanywhere pgm?..does it require port forwarding, etc. to access on the net as does PCAnywhere?

Again thanks for your help

Nick

 

[DTSMAN]

You will load VNC on all stations and the server. On the server you already have control over it with pca. The stations will have vnc app mode in their stratup so it is always ready, there will be an icon on them by the windows clock. When dialed into the server you will open vnc viewer and enter the computer name you want to see. It is very simple. We install servers that run the touch screen registers in restaurants and use this every day so we can monitor the individual registers when they tell us, "when I touch this, this happens". So once you have passed the router with pca to the server there is no need for anymore port forwarding.

 

[NicholasM]

Great!...Many thanks for the info. I downloaded VNC and started "playing" with it within the internal network...havent tried remote access yet...But I notice that it uses port 5900...Does that mean I have to have that port open and fowarded to the ip addresses of the stations on the network?....In addition it seems to use port 5800 for Java Apps (not sure exactly what this is all about?

Again many thanks for the info and feedcack

Nick

 

[jpm121]

Nicholas, VNC is quite nice.

Port 5900 is to access the actual "host" application running on the remote machine.

Port 5800 allows you to access the PC using IE or any Java browser -- I actually find it to be faster and more reliable than using the host program.

The VNC client portion handles sending all the screen updates to your browser window. I find response times to be more than adequate over a 768k SDSL line.

 

[NicholasM]

Thanks for the info...Im using the 4.x beta of the pgm..Unfortunately there are no docs for that version and the prior version seemed to have a feature to turn off the desktop wallpaper on the host to speed things up...cant seem to find where that feature is in the new beta ver...any ideas?

I

 

[NicholasM]

I understand the ports for the server and java applet...but would like to know how I would configure three stations..so that when I use the java applet from a remote it would access the particular station I want...Right now when I use the applet I get onto Station1 and from there can use the vieweer to get to desktop of station 2 and 3 but this is slow process....would like to be able to go from remote directly to desktop of station1, 2 or 3...

I tried assigning separate port addresses to each station but this didnt seem to work...

Appreciate any help on this

Nick

 

[jpm121]

Assuming you're going through a NAT router of some sort, I'd suggest setting each host up with a different port number (it's part of the VNC setup).

I'm making up IP addresses here, but you get the idea:

PC #1 192.168.1.100 port 5801
PC #2 192.168.1.101 port 5802
PC #3 192.168.1.102 port 5803

Then, in your router, tell it to forward each given port to the particular IP address. You may need to set each workstation with a static IP address for this to work reliably.

Then, when you connect to

http://xx.xx.xx.xx:5803

you'll connect to PC #3

Got it?

 

[NicholasM]

Thanks for the reply....Clear as a bell....Is there any major difference on using TightVNC rather than VNC?...

 

[jpm121]

VNC is the basic technology name, developed by AT&T labs I think (or one of those brain trusts). There are a ton of flavors of VNC out there -- TightVNC being one of them.

It's the first one I tried, it works great, and I stopped looking for others.