TeamViewer

[Jim K..]

How do you set that up? Currently ageing relatives have to tell me a password over the phone for me to be able to connect....assuming they can read it properly (ffs etc) ...

[Bill]

What alternatives to TeamViewer are people using?

I have been hit by their sudden "Commercial use suspected" even though I only ever connect to one 86-year old friend. He and his wife have 3 Windows machines and he has just bought 2 old iMacs, and is trying to move to Mac in spite of my protestations. Hence a flurry of connections.

Teamviewer has a form to fill in to protest private use, but here it just leads to an error page. I found their forum, but all that reveals is a huge thread full of similar complaints, so it looks as though the Teamviewer free option is on the way out. They seem to be manually deleting any references to rivals on the forum and also any email addresses.

I still help a couple of commercial companies with their IT, but always in person. I used to recommend TeamViewer, but having delved into the shambles that is their web site, I now think the time has come to find an alternative that works to access Windows and Macs.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

[Andy Burns]

Where I can, I use reverse VNC so the person needing help connects to me, so they don't need to dick about with firewall rules, and I can hapilly se up port forwarding at my end, and it's not reliant on any 3rd party's servers,

So, I don't use it much, but have used AnyDesk as a TeamViewer substitute.

[spuorgelgoog]

I have Teamviewer set to start automatically on a friend's PC so I can connect without him doing anything.

It even works (worked) if he'd forgotten his password or I needed to get in as administrator.

The last "upgrade" lost the "contacts" list and seems to have made things a lot more complicated.

Owain

[Bill]

Thanks, Andy. I've just tried AnyDesk between two machines here and it seems pretty good. I'm also looking at the Chrome Remote Desktop add-on but have not yet got as far with that.

[T i m]

I've had that a few times over the years but I can't remember what I've done to carry on past it? I've not applied any 'hacks' or tried to trick it, other than using it from another PC for a while?

Maybe things have changed now?

<snip>

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Its an option when you install it.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes how much are they asking for a licence. If companies made it relatively cheap most of us would not mind paying really, the problem is that many companies seem to want you to buy their things every year like some kind of rental. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

One of the big issues I have with these bits of software is that many have screwed around with the api so screenreaders cannot 'see' the other end correctly. This puts blind people at a disadvantage Brian

[T i m]

Or after you have installed it. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Jethro_uk]

NoMachine ? X2Go ?

[Pancho]

+1

I have used NoMachine for a few years and it seems similar to Teamviewer.

[John Rumm]

Teamviewer is not cheap for a commercial license. It starts at £32/month for a single user, single session.

Many of the remote access tools have changed to similar payment models, and lots have discontinued access to any kind of free service.

Some years back I did a trawl through many of them looking for a decent platform that would allow purchase of a perpetual licence, and preferably also allow self hosting. I found one in the end, but I note that even they only promote the rental / cloud model version of it now. (even though if you ask they will still sell perpetual licenses)

Indeed... one of the reasons they like selling cloud services and any other "As A Service" offering. Nice recurring revenues.

[Jethro_uk]

I started off using X2Go ages ago. It's good, but I never managed to get it to run a console session in Linux, which proved a deal breaker. I used Teamviewer for a while (which did allow console sessions). Can't recall what put me off them.

Currently happy with NoMachine (NX protocol).

[NY]

I use RealVNC. This is available in server and client form as separate packages: you put the server on the PC you want to control and the client on the one(s) you want to control it from. The only drawback that I am aware of are: no file transfer, no remote sound (ie client can hear the sound that the server PC is playing through its soundcard) and maximum of 5 PCs in your "team" that can be accessed remotely if you are using a free version. Like Teamviewer, RealVNC is slow if you have a slow internet, even if you are accessing a PC on the LAN, so I think traffic goes up to a Teamviewer server and then back down the same connection to the other PC. RealVNC does have the facility to do a direct connection, bypassing the WAN, but that's only for the commercial paid-for version - apart from the server component that is built into my Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Stretch) which *can* be used as a direct connection.

I used to use Teamviewer, both for true remote access (*) and for controlling one PC on my LAN from another - eg to access my desktop PC from my laptop upstairs.

I changed to RealVNC after failing foul of the Teamviewer "commercial use suspected" last August, and I wondered whether the long time that I was connected to PCs within my LAN might have triggered it. I filled in the Declaration of Private Use and after about a week normal service was resumed, though they totally ignored my question about what might have triggered the false detection.

Now it's happened again. I filled in the form about a week again but haven't had any responses so far. What's the betting they again restore normal usage without any info about why it keeps being triggered. It's annoying because I spend quite a bit of time helping my parents remotely, either with general PC problems or with work on a (non-commercial**) website that they run. At present it's giving me the "you will be disconnected after 5 minutes" which is actually very pessimistic: I've sometimes been connected a lot longer without being kicked off. Sometimes I can't re-connect for a few minutes if I disconnect and then realise I've forgotten something. I've now taken my own local copy of the site which I modify and upload changes as required, and then use Teamviewer to batch-copy all the files that I have changed to my dad's PC which supposedly has the master for the site.

(*) The "best" remote connection was from my mobile phone, on a cruise ship on Christmas Eve, about 10 miles off the coast of Denmark (Scandinavia's mobile phone/internet signals stretch about 15 miles off the coast, unlike the UKs where you are lucky to get a signal more than about a mile off the south coast), scheduling a new recording on my PVR (TVHeadend on the Raspberry Pi).

(**) None of us draws a wage to work on it, and users of the site are not charged any money to access the data. That makes it unambiguously non-commercial, to my way of thinking.

[NY]

You set the remote PC(s) to have "easy access" as part of the user account that the client logs on as. Much better than having to phone to say "what's today's password". When I set it up on my own PCs, I was prompted to set a permanent password and to supply it, but when I did it on my parents' PCs, I wasn't given the option to define a password and I always get in unchalleneged - because I'm "trusted".

[Pancho]

I too can't remember why I stopped using Teamviewer, but suspect it had something to do with money.

I don't know what you mean console session in Linux. Do you mean ssh client, if so why not use MobaXterm (or Putty, if you can handle the mouse button cut/paste dangers)

[NY]

Yes I used to use LogMeIn until they started to charge exorbitant prices and totally stopped their free service. That had one advantage over Teamviewer and RealVNC that you didn't need to install a client package: you just contacted their webserver and logged in, and everything was done from a web interface.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Install a VPN instance as endpoint on the machine, poke a hole in the router forwarding, generate RSA certs and connect away using VNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop. Or move the VPN service onto a Raspberry Pi, and jump onto the whole house network.

[Jethro_uk]

No, I mean access to the *physical* screen of the machine.

A lot of Linux remote solutions create virtual displays (remember, Linux is really Unix. Multi user and session from the ground up).

That said, ssh access is a godsend. I have an aversion to having to clamber around a cupboard to view a physical screen if a machine has stalled on bootup. Which makes it more surprising that there appears to be no "ssh by default" liveCDs out there. I had to roll my own.