I'm trying to remotely control a Macintosh computer. I know that in the Windows world, you can use Remote Desktop to connect from one Windows computer to another Windows computer. This works relatively well.
I know that you can use a VNC server but this isn't always the most secure or give the best performance. Are there other options available for remotely connecting to a Mac?
In some situations Copilot is a good solution. Not so much for day-to-day admin, but great for remote tech support.
If you need the solution to be cross-platform (ie, controlling an OS X box from Windows) then VNC is the obvious choice. I've had much better luck with the free Vine VNC Server than with Apple's built in one. As for viewers, Chicken of the VNC on OS X or Tight VNC on Windows are good solutions.
As others have said, for security firewall VNC and then use an SSH tunnel. There's lots of ways to do that, and the exact details depends on OS, firewall, network, etc. One method of creating an SSH tunnel for VNC is described here.
If you're trying to connect from one (Leopard) Mac to another, you can use the built-in Screen Sharing functionality; turn the server on from the Sharing System Preferences pane, and either use the network browser (on a LAN) or just open a vnc:// URL.
If you're trying to manage a bunch of Macs, try Apple's Remote Desktop (ARD) software; it's sold in 10- and unlimited-client versions, so if you've got fewer than 5 or so Macs it's probably not worth the money. The client bits for ARD are part of OS X. Screen Sharing and ARD use the same protocol, which includes some Apple-proprietary extensions to VNC which do encryption (either of all data, or of just keystroke/password info) and support adaptive JPEG compression, which gives you decent-enough performance (usable, but nothing like RDP or NX unfortunately).
If you need something cross-platform, check out TeamViewer (which will punch through firewalls and so forth).
Apple's Remote Desktop has AES encryption. Another good way is to just enable SSH in sharing and use shell access to perform tasks without interrupting the user.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
^That's your best solution.
If you go into the Settings panel, you can find a variety of other remote access options including SSH.
You can use VNC which is built into Tiger.
Yeah, VNC is good, but what about Apple's Remote Desktop?
If you are looking for a free, secure solution: I would recommend using any of a number of VNC servers that are available, blocking the ports that VNC uses to communicate, and then using SSH tunneling to connect. This way, ssh is encrypting everything, and you can still rely on free, open source (?), and cross platform standards for controlling the Desktop remotely.
Citrix, the people behind pc anywhere and the windows remote desktop have a hosted app called "Go to my pc" https://www.gotomypc.com/
I've heard people says it good.
I personally like RHUB's service for remote access and collaboration. It's an appliance that's easy to use and very secure. The device works from behind your firewall (instead of outside of it).
if you need low bandwidth or cross platform there's RDP server for mac that also offers there own iRapp protocol
from their site:
http://www.coderebel.com/2013/11/08/irapp-mac-client-available-download
Lowest supported speed: 512 kbit/s (64 KB/s) for iRAPP protocol
By adjusting the image quality you are able to make iRAPP work on
lower bandwidth connections as recommended above.
iRapp TS (Mac Terminal Server) allows multiple users to connect one
Mac simultaneously
Related
Basically what I want to do is write iOS code on Xcode from my Windows PC which is connected to my Macbookpro. I tried a lot of applications for this and most of them connect through the internet and have screen action delays. Some of the other applications have a problem with sending mac commands from my windows keyboard.
So:
- Fast LAN connection
- Ability to pass mac shortcuts
- Responsive
- Hopefully free
- Hopefully copy paste data between computers
to state the obvious,so we are on the same page. the LAN is your Local Area Network, and the parameters of your LAN are defined by the Coverage area of your Modem's Wifi Range and the amount of Ethernet Hard Wire Connections, if you are trying to connect to a Mac on your LAN From a Windows Machine on the same LAN, That is not referred to as REMOTE CONNECTION, That is referred to as LOCAL NETWORKING, Connecting Remotely, or Remote Connection is when you connect From a Remote LAN or one that is not Your Personal LAN, and you use that LAN to Connect to a Computer on your LAN, that's remote connection, Hence, your connecting remotely, so.. Are you using Your LAN to achieve this and your having lag issues, or a you trying to do it remotely, if your trying to Remote Connect and your having trouble with Software, because i know it can be a pain, You should have mentioned what you have already tried, But.. Windows Remote Desktop Connection is buggy, i wouldn't recommend it, the way to go use to be TeamViewer as a free solution, then they Stopped the Free thing and started charging, Other Options were CrossLoop, it's good, but sometimes slow, Try if you haven't already, Most of the Good option are Paid, i rate Bomgar to be the highest, because your accessing Remotely via way of a Remote Box that is not technically inside the parameters of your LAN, hence more secure. LogMeIn is a good one
but as far as free is concerned, and to get the results you want, there is not much out there, obviously the idea is that they want you to buy the full versions, i'll do some research for you, but.. is it possible for you to provide a list of what you have already experimented with thus far, so i don't double handle. thanks
I have slow network, slow probably because of the tools to filter the traffic and because we run VPN, so sometimes when i run TeamViewer on one PC from the network, i get ID and PW and try to connect from PC out of the network it just accepts ID and PW and hangs, doesnt show anything, i think this is because the network is too slow right ?
So i am wondering would VNC be better solution ? I know that VNC is slow even if you run it on fast LAN network, but i think its slow because its protocol is made like that, other than that i think it will be more reliable than TeamViewer ?
Also suggest me "best" VNC server and client.
Other suggestions are welcome as well.
Thanks in advance.
Teamviewer has been quite buggy for me, and a little heavy on the CPU, specially when using it in non-Windows machines. Hamachi, however, has worked well for me in the past.
I recommend that you use Hamachi to set up a virtual "VPN", and then use the built-in client/servers for remote desktop access. In Ubuntu, use the standard screen sharing, that uses a VNC server/client; in Windows, use remote desktop connection from Microsoft, and on the Mac, use the standard Desktop Sharing service (which is a VPN service/server, but only seems to work perfectly with Apple clients).
I need a virtual server for web development, it'll host Apache+Postgres+Ruby+something else.
What's the most effective software to run such a server? (ie with least virtualization overhead)
Is there a way to run Linux as as service?
I use VirtualBox at the moment, but it's inconvenient in some ways, such as it needs an emulator window open which also captures keyboard input when alttabbed into.
(Also, coLinux hangs at boot on my machine, so it's probably not an option)
Check out the features of VMWare Server. It's free, you just have to register.
I've never found VMware to be much of a performance hog unless running 3+ virtual machines.
The latest free server version (VMware Server 2) runs as a service IIRC, so you can set up your dev server to start up and shut down when your PC does, and you can either log on to the VM's console through the web interface, or create a shortcut on your desktop so it's fairly non-obtrusive.
There is a very convenient utility that hides VirtualBox from the foreground completely: vboxctrl. With vboxctrl you can run a Linux server on your Windows machine, make it automatically go to sleep when Windows shuts down or hibernates; then use any SSH client to log in to the server. Or you can use Xming to open graphical windows from the Linux server; I've worked quite a lot of time in GVim open through Xming.
If anyone needs more details, leave a comment, I may write an article about this.
What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.
Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.
VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.
VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.
I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.
You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).
If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.
Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.
VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.
VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.
None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.
If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.
For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.
For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.
Hope that helps.
If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.
But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.
Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.
I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.
It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.
I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)
Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though
CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.
Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.
This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.
Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.
You can try both approaches.
P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).
If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).
If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.
If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.
I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).
Does anyone know of a similar product to Citrix Server that'll run on the Mac OS?
Essentially, I'm looking to allow multiple remote users to log in to the same OSX Server at the same time (with full visual desktop, not SSH).
OS X's Quartz window server has no remoting abilities, unlike its predecessor. X11 does, but 'native' OS X applications don't use that; of the few Mac apps typically run in X11 (such as GIMP or CrossOver), none are specific to the Mac, so you might as well run them on a different OS.
That said, if all you want is to visually remote-control a session, it is possible to use VNC or a derivative, such as Apple Remote Desktop. Since 10.4, this allows for multiple simultaneous sessions, as implemented with Vine Server. Remote Desktop also has other abilities such as remotely installing and updating software.
(Unlike Citrix and X11, VNC does not send drawing commands over the network; it instead transmits a compressed image representation pixel-per-pixel.)
You should specify your exact needs. You will not get a Citrix-like experience where you can run single Mac apps in their own remote session. You will, however, get remote graphical control, and that may be more than enough for you.
I've never heard of it, but from their blog:
Aqua Connect Terminal Server uses the VNC (Virtual Network Computing) protocol to send data between Mac OS X and the client application.
Now, if someone does know of a non-VNC solution, I'd be happy to hear it.
Anyone have experience with Aqua Connect? Found them from Google, and they claim the next version works on RDP as well as VNC. Wondering if it's just a nice wrapper around the VNC capabilities #Soeren Kuklau pointed out.
Thanks for the link to Vine Server, that's worth investigating.
John Vasileff,
Back to My Mac is a tunnelling / NAT traversal technique that enables the use of any networking (including VNC-based remote control). iChat screen sharing, Finder Screen Sharing and Remote Desktop all use VNC. Apple does not offer any non-VNC solutions.
Citrix XenDesktop iPhone Demo