Remote access is UR Friend

I rebooted my main file server late last night. I’m working in an all Windows shop, so we use Remote Desktop to access our servers. Remote Desktop is very fast in LAN environments, performance is decent over an internet VPN, and it just works.

In this case, however, I needed another tool. I rebooted the server, and it didn’t respond after 10 minutes — normally, more than enough time to reboot. I was worried that it was stuck at a boot prompt; sometimes a CD in the drive will be checked for bootable media before the hard drive is checked and the system will boot off the CD instead.

In this case, the filesystems hasn’t been checked in a number of days, and automatically ran CHKDSK.

We have another solution, an IP Keyboard-Video-Monitor switch, or KVM. With a traditional KVM, you switch multiple PCs between one physical keyboard, video and monitor. With an IP KVM, you can access the KVM via a network using their own proprietary protocols. I logged into the KVM switch, which could show the boot time display, and was able to see what was happening.

Remote Desktop is available for Windows 2003 and XP. It’s licensed either with terminal server licenses to allow multiple connections or with 2 built-in licenses for remote assistance/administration.

There are other solutions available, such as Remote Administrator from Famatech. I’ve used that in the past with Windows NT and Windows 2000 clients. VNC is another popular choice — VNC is open source, cross platform, and extendable. I’ve used UltraVNC with their encryption plugin to access systems remotely and securely across the internet. Not recommended, but definitely useful in low-security environments. Since VNC requires NAT forwarding to run, it requires some work to configure. There’s a project called PCHelpware that reverses the connection. Instead of the client connecting to a server, the PCHelpware application, when run, connects as a server to a hard-coded client. This allows for one-click, no configuration remote access - perfect for offsite consulting, helping mom/dad with that computer problem, etc.

Postscript: One thing I never bothered looking up was how to send a ctrl-alt-delete via remote desktop. If you hit ctrl-alt-delete, the client system intercepts the call and your local system responds. To get the remote system to respond, hit ctrl-alt-end.

Another common remote desktop issue (when not licensed for Terminal Services) is that you may have two connections already connected to the server, and Remote Desktop will not allow a third. From the Start->Run menu, running the Remote Desktop client with the command line “mstsc /v:servername /console” will access the console directly.

Possibly Related Posts:

Have a look at http://www.adder.com or http://www.realVNC.com, Adder and VNC have got together to produce a KVM-via-IP product with out the performance and security limitations of a java based KVM-via-ip solution. Coming soon will be iPEPS (IP engine per server) which will provide a completely non-blocking (any user to any server any time) kvm-via-ip solution.

OK, I’ll bite — how did you find my post so quickly?