I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewer to listen for connections, then the end user with pc problems can download your customized ultravnc server that will connect to your viewer through firewalls/etc. This has a lot of things going for it. 1) ease of use by the end user 2) only one network to make firewall configuration changes on, 3) small quick download. The biggest downside I see is that the ultravnc viewer doesn’t run on linux.
Tag: support
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Ultravnc for remote computer support
A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Computing.) The original VNC (now realvnc) came out of AT&T research labs in the UK and has developed quite a following as a pcanywhere alternative depending on what you need to do. Now, tightvnc has been a favorite of mine for a couple reasons. 1) it’s well supported under linux which is a must for me…, 2) it excels at slower speed connections. Which is also fairly important to me.
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XBox 360 launch and problems
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
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VNC or Tightvnc for remote pc access
I was surprised to do a search and find that I haven’t mentioned tightvnc before (or even merely VNC as a useful tool.) Ok – here’s the scenario, you need a way to get remote pc access, or remotely view a desktop, maybe it’s a Windows machine and you’re using a Mac? Or Maybe it’s a Mac and you have a linux desktop? Or a Linux server from a Windows machine? Most of the time in the Windows to Windows remote control area the choice becomes either Remote Desktop, or PCAnywhere. There are other options though. One that I’m particularly found of is TightVNC, which is an implementation of the VNC protocol (VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing).
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Part 2 of the Mandrake or Mandriva 2006 review
I’m still not used to the name Mandriva, Mandrake is just what I remember… anyway, mandrake.tips.4.free.fr has the second part of their mandriva 2006 review up. It sounds as though in the last week the iso’s of the free edition are now publicly available as well. This time around special attention is paid to hardware support, and multimedia capabilites focusing on image handling/editing software.
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Opendocument format getting more support
There is support building for the opendocument format, it seems. The format is designed to prevent document lockin to proprietary formats and the group promoting it would like to see it supported by all office suites. (Currently OpenOffice.org 2 and Staroffice support the format, koffice 1.4.2 partially supports it (1.5 due for release after the new year should fully support the format. IBM Workplace (based on openoffice) also partially supports the new format.)
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Risk – type strategy game using Google Maps
This one caught my eye as I’ve spent many long hours playing different variations on the old strategy board game Risk. It appears that using Google Maps, a group has managed to write an API that let’s you Play Risk with Google maps as the backdrop.
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Mozilla Firefox birthday
According to spreadfirefox.com, a year ago today was the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0
Firefox was released prior to November 9th, 2004 in preview releases and early betas, but the official 1.0 came out a year ago today, hard to believe. According to some sources it has as much as 10% of the web market share, although that’s tough to gauge (varies by site content.) It shipped originally with support for “17 languages and on 5 platforms”.
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Phpbb include vulnerability scanning
Incidents.org is reporting scanning for phpbb include vulnerabilities through Google. Apparently there is an IRC botnet being “cultivated”. They are scanning for versions of phpBB prior to 2.0.10, the current release is 2.0.18.
The new IRC bot scans for vulnerable systems using Google, when successful it announces that “oopz and sirh0t and Aleks g0t pwned u!”, and has UDP flooding and UDP/ICMP/TCP scanning capabilities.
The file phpbb_patch was found on exploited systems.