The job you hate most?

[Ron Lowe]

The problem is, 'people' want incompatible things.

They want things to 'just work' when they plug them in. But they also want them to be 'secure out of the box' and 'flexible and configurable'. And they don't want to have to learn 'technical mumbo jumbo' to reconcile these things.

So OS vendors are between a rock and a hard place. If it 'just works' when they plug it in, then it probably means that users can easily access shared folders without having to worry about nasty things like firewall rules, local subnets, ACLs, etc etc. The only way to achieve this 'usability' it to set security down to non-existent by default. Then others will raise hell about that.

If the users are not capable of making informed choices, then the software needs to second-guess the situation and make guesses on their behalf. That's where a lot of issues arise.

I guess that's what cluefull friends and relations are for. < having spent 4 hours on the phone to MIL last week. The conversation began with : "We've just bought a new PC, but..." >

[Andy Hall]

Shouldn't trouble Microsoft, then.

Quite. Back to Symantec.

They could have bought a Mac Mini and you could administer the whole thing for them easily and remotely.

[Clive George]

I've been doing this with windows boxen recently - there are various web conferencing tools available to let you do this quite easily.

cheers, clive

[Ron Lowe]

They had XP, but the crippled Home Edition with no Remote Desktop.

I talked them through getting online, downloading and installing TightVNC, and telling me their IP address. I then took over remotely.

Windows works perfectly well like this, just a shame they took remote desktop out of XP Home for marketing reasons.

Now, with Vista, you have a much larger range of Version Hell to deal with! DogFooding from Vista Ultimate here.

[Andy Hall]

I was really talking about proper system administration to all aspects of the machine. Web tools have too many dependencies on the behaviour of the target machine to be of use for this.

[Andy Hall]

VNC is a better remote solution than Remote Desktop anyway.

Shudders.

At least with Unix based systems one can have a remote access such as SSH, even if only a CLI in the worst case, with very little else of the machine working.

[Ron Lowe]

My imagines trying an average Windows users with:

"rlogin to the machine, su to root and and fsck the dirty filesystem. Then check the entry in /etc/fstab to see where it's mounting."

[John Rumm]

You might want to check out UltraVNC-SC. It lets you build a small standalone exe (under 100K) that "phones home" and hands over remote support.

The user downloads and runs it - no need to install anything. It then contacts a VNC viewer you have running in listen mode, and gives you control. You preprogram the list of machines that can provide support when you build it, and those are the only ones it will then communicate with. Because it makes the initial outbound connection from the client, there is no need to worry about firewalls and NAT traversal in most cases, you don't even need to know the users IP. You can also use it concurrently on several remote PCs. So if I need to perform some action on half a dozen PCs for a client I can have him run it on each, and each comes in on a separate window at my end.

The other sometimes useful tool is CrossLoop. This is a wrapper around TightVNC that doies require installing, however has the advantage of being able to make an outgoing connection at *both* ends, and not needing any pre arranged listeners. Handy for when you want to remote support someone but are away from your own PC at the time.

[John Rumm]

The only thing I will say for the remote desktop client / with Terminal Serivces (TA) or Remote Admin (RA), is that its screen update performance is actully very good. It creates a more credible "feeling" user session than VNC. When doing RA with it, or using a TS session, it feels only slightly slower than actually being there, whereas with VNC you are often very much aware that it is not as good as being there.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Down to habits, I think - I rarely use content searching (for which Spotlight is infinitely better than anything in XP), and almost always want a filename search. Spotlight doesn't do filenames first... and takes ages to get around to it.

Spotlight in apps (Mail, iTunes etc) is whizzy. Spotlight in the Finder just does not do what I want of a search box!

Cheers - Jaimie

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

RDP hooks into Windows graphics at a low level, where the screen is being assembled - what's being sent back and forth is "Draw a line from here to here", "Draw bitmap [X] here" and so on.

VNC is an after-the-fact protocol, so it's all "Send this huge block of graphics that's changed on the source machine".

Unsurprisingly, VNC is much higher bandwidth. But it's easier to get working and infinitely more useful if you have a mix of OSes to connect to.

Cheers - Jaimie

[John Rumm]

Indeed, although in cases where you can install it on the target machine and it can use its video hook driver you can get closer to the RDP way of working.

Yup; definitely one of those "kitchen sink" utilities that can make life so much easier!

[Clive George]

And I was talking about that too. Provided it's basically working, there are web conferencing tools out there which basically give you VNC on windows without the tedium of opening up a port to the outside world. From there you've got everything but the stuff before windows starts.

clive

[Andy Hall]

Mmm.. The problem is that all of this relies on almost everything working properly in the first place. Despite legal actions and claims to the contrary, IE remains heavily integrated to the "operating system" and an IE fault can wreck access to the underlying components.

From the other side, driver and allied registry issues in Windows will often result in the system failing to start or blue-screening.

These issues are much less common with Unix based systems and there are easy methods of access to fix them without requiring virtually everything to be working first..

[Clive George]

Well, it's been some years since I've had to do anything like that. The stuff I'm having to deal with is more likely to be 'how do I do this', or virus/security-related stuff (can't trust rellies...)

True IME too. But then I use the unix-based stuff for servers, which means nothing needing special drivers/whatever anyway.

OTOH if you're talking about Mac based stuff - well, my mum was tempted late last year when she was getting a new computer. But then she noticed the prices. I know you value your time so much that this sort of thing is irrelevant to you - but her time/money balance is shifted more towards having time. (and it's probably cost me less time supporting her too, since I know the system)

clive

[mark]

wow, I don't know how anyone can say that. I can only assume it took you a long time because you're so used to windows.

[Huge]

That was my assumption. I try not to do anything to Windows, because jobs I can accomplish in Unix in about 30 seconds take days of swearing culminating in a complete re-install when I try to do them in Windows.

It always makes me smile when people talk about how intuitive Windows is when what they actually mean is that they've been using it for

20 years so they know where everything is.

[GB]

An elderly lady I know told me very proudly that she had greased her car's sunshine roof with butter. She was sooooooo proud she had done this herself and not involved a garage. Several years later, her car was still smelling of rancid butter.

[Linker3000]

Once, last year, I was supplied a few with a UPS and they *did* have a hole/screw arrangement for the wire - I was soooo excited!

Never seen any like them before or since :-(