Remote Troubleshooting

Being able to access a user’s desktop remotely is a boon for network administrators, as they don’t have to run around all over the place doing troubleshooting. There are various commercial packages that have been providing this facility since a very long time, one case in point being pcAnywhere. There are also some free softwares available that allow you to do the same, and not to mention the built-in remote access features in desktop OSs like Win XP. Here we look at the freely available features in Windows and Linux. 

Win XP Professional has what’s called Remote Desktop Connection and Remote Assistance that allows you to access the machine remotely, whether over a LAN or even the Internet. 

Remote Desktop Connection



Although this is not as feature rich as a commercial product like pcAnywhere, it has the basic functionality of providing remote access and control. It let’s you access any Win XP Professional computer that has the Remote Desktop feature enabled. The computer accessing the XP desktop can have any Windows OS installed on it. All it needs is the Remote Desktop connection software loaded. This comes on the Win XP CD. The same software can also be used to connect to Microsoft Terminal Services running on a Win 2000 Server. The Terminal services also let you manage a Win 2000 Server remotely. 

Configuring Remote Desktop software is very simple. In Win XP, right click on My Computer and select properties. Click on the Remote tab and under Remote Desktop, click on the “Allow users to connect remotely” check box. You can configure the Win 2000 Terminal Services by going to the Control Panel/Administrative Tasks and then Services. From the list that pops up, start the ‘Terminal Services’ by right clicking on it and selecting Start. This allows you to share its desktop remotely. 

To access a Win XP desktop remotely, go to Programs>Accessories> Communication and click on “Remote Desktop Connection”. This will pop up a dialogue box. Enter the IP-address or Computer Name of the XP machine and click on connect. This will pop up the remote machine’s Login Dialogue Box. Enter the username and password for that machine, login, and you’ll see its desktop. 

Remote Assistance 



Remote Assistance is a useful feature of Microsoft Win XP, and is a little different from the Remote Desktop, and allows remote desktop sharing. This feature also let’s both the local and remote users’ to interact on the same desktop, providing each other help. One difference in this utility from the Remote Desktop is that it’s available in both flavors of Win XP, Home and Professional. Secondly, it is possible for both users (The expert, who is providing help, and the novice who needs help) to be logged on at the same time in the same session and work together. The best part is that all activities including keystrokes and mouse movement are visible to both the machines and can be controlled simultaneously. Here the remote user doesn’t get access through password verification. Instead, the novice allows the remote expert to first get connected and then control the PC.

To send a remote assistance invitation, select “My Computer” and right click it. Next select properties and go to “Remote” and select the checkbox that says “Allow Remote Assistance invitation to be sent from this computer”. Now logon on to MSN Messenger, and find the person whom you want to call for help (This of course means that the remote user must have a .NET passport). If he/she is online then, start a conversation with him/her. Next go to the “Actions” menu in the messenger and click on “Ask for Remote Assistance”. A request will be transmitted to the expert, and if the expert accepts the request, then a window will open on his PC, as shown below.

The image contains two parts, one is the chatting window and the other is the desktop of the novice’s machine. If the expert wants to take control of the novice’s machine, then he just has to click on the ‘take control’ button at the upper left corner of the window. Then a dialogue box will open at the novice user’s machine to get his permission. If he clicks on ok then the expert can take control over the novice’s machine. The novice can withdraw control from the expert at any time simply by pressing the “Esc” key. 

The Linux Side



Most of the things we mentioned in Windows are also possible with Linux. For Remote Desktop Sharing, PCQLinux 8.0 comes with “rDesktop”, the Terminal server client for Linux and “tsclient”, the front-end for “rDesktop”. We have covered it in the March 2003 issue of PCQuest, but we’ll do a short recap here. 

Microsoft NT, XP (Professional) and 2000 (Server or Advance Server) can be connected with tsclient. To start using “tsclient”, you have to go to start>extra>Internet and select the Terminal Server Client icon. Now it will ask you for the IP address of the Windows Terminal Server. If you click on the More button it will ask you for additional details like user name, password and Domain of that machine. You can also change the window size and color depth of the remote desktop from the display tab. This software also gives you the flexibility to set local resources (key combinations like Alt + tab, Alt + Ctl + Del) will run on which machine (Local or Remote). To connect to the Win XP/2000 machine you first have to configure them. We’ve already explained this in the Windows part.

Remote Assistance



In March 2003, a new version of KDE was released, 3.1.1. This has some good features related to Remote Assistance. We haven’t given it on this month’s DVD, but you can either download it from http://www.kde. org/download/, or wait for our July CD. KDE 3.1.1 that has an in-built feature called Desktop Sharing. It provides you with all the features of Microsoft’s Remote Assistance. This feature works on the VNC Protocol, so any VNC client running on any OS, Windows or Linux, can connect to the machine running Desktop Sharing

(krfb). 

Now to set Desktop Sharing, go to start and select Control Center. It will pop up the control center window. Select Internet and Network option, and then Desktop sharing. From here you can set whether it will respond for Invited or Uninvited (all) connections. If you select “allow uninvited connection”, it will prompt you for a password, which users use to connect to your machine. If you don’t select it, then you have to create an invitation to allow a user to connect to your machine. To do so, click on “create and manage invitation”. This will pop up a window, which will show two options for invitation. One is by email and other personal. Each invitation will create a session that another person can connect to your machine with a randomly generated password for one hour. The only difference between both of is that if you select “New Personal Invitation”, then a random password and other details should be transferred manually, whereas if you select “New Email invitation”, then the details will be emailed to the person whom you want to share your desktop with. 

To connect to krfb, use any VNC viewer, enter the IP address and display number of the server to which you want to connect. If you are using uninvited connection then it transmits a request to the server asking to accept the connection. If “Accept Connection” is selected, only then will you be able to connect to the server. You can configure the server to directly connect to every request by unselecting “Confirm uninvited connection before connecting” in the Desktop Sharing dialogue box from the Control Center. But note that this is not a good for security reasons.

Anindya Roy