Der Tekcömmandö Files: VNC and Me

With the goodly number of computers -- one per person, now -- in the house, I often need to go hither and yon to do my thing with them if they are not behaving normally. There's J's office machine (Beauty) in the bedroom, my Mac and two PC lappies (EYD and her dad) and Beast out here in the common room. Upon occasion, I need to do things to or with them on the network.

How do I control them all? Think Lord of the Rings: Sauron gave the various rings out to exercise control over humans, dwarves and elves and had the One ring to rule them all. In the case of the home network, all I need to do is hand each machine on it a ring of sorts -- a VNC (virtual networking computing) server program to install and install the One Ring -- a VNC client -- in my Mac. Kinda neat?

EYS thought so when I showed him how I can log into his system from my Mac. Since Beauty is a work machine, I did not touch it. Her work requires her to run a VNC server and I do not want to fsck with that without knowing the specifics.

It's nice to know that if I need to, I can access home desktop machines from anywhere there is a network connection. Of course this is no help when the network is down . . .

VNC also suffers when there are bandwidth issues. At Apple, I got to work with Apple Remote Desktop, a Mac-specific remote admin solution. Slick, sweet interface, real time scanning . . . and a network with enough bandwidth to not lag. Since Beast's primary network connection is with an early G-generation wireless card, and it looks to be a 802.11B link at best . . . I suspect that 11 Mbps WLAN coupled to the rather lame video capability of the MacBook is why the control feels as laggy as a frozen arthritic snail in molasses.