One thing people love to do is to be able to log on to another computer from the computer they're at
right now. To in essence make the desk top of that remote computer magically appear on your computer
right here.
This is a fantastic way to do things like to provide support or training or just to be able to get to
your own computer and take a look at a file or something like that.
Now the important thing to appreciate when we're talking about remote connections like these is that
you can't really in general you can't transfer files from your remote desktop to your local desktop.
Things like that.
It's just a way to show you your graphical user interface on a remote computer so you can do things.
Now this whole idea of Remote Desktop was pushed a long long time ago by a company called Citrix and
Citrix used a standard that they developed called
ICA to provide over an IP network a way to do this type of stuff.
Now it's been done before Citrix but it was a lot of people did proprietary things that it was all strange
and weird.
Now today Citrix is still out there and very very popular.
But there's two other alternatives and these are the ones I want to concentrate on right now.
And one of those is a very very easy use one called TightVNC.
Let's start off with him.
The first thing I need to mention about TightVNC is it is a completely free product and it runs on
every operating system known to man. In fact with a lot of operating systems,
it comes out of the box.
So if you get for example a Mac or if you were to get most Linux distributions you get tight VNC as
part of the package.
You can get it for Windows too.
It's totally free but you got to download it. When you download TightVNC you get a viewer.
And you also get a service.
So I've already got the service started on my machine but what's more fun is I've got the service started
on another machine and what I want to do is connect to that.
So I've already got the IP address punched in I'm ready to go.
So I'm just going to hit connect.
And I am now on one of my other machines.
Now this is right here in the house with me.
But this could just as easily be on the other side of the world using the Internet.
It works perfectly fine. TightVNC is actually even used with for example the Citrix ICA servers.
We use TightVNC as the client to connect to those. TightVNC runs normally on port 5900 but you can change
that if you'd like.
Now the fun part about all this is that we literally are on that remote box right now so if I want to
do anything I can just jump right in there.
And as though I was on that remote system so that's tight VNC.
I love tight VNC.
It's FREE.
It works well.
It's easy to use in fact it's so simple to use that it's actually shocking.
Now the other two I want to show you.
Is Microsoft's remote desktop tools.
Now there's two ways to do a remote desktop.
One way is to have a remote desktop server and that's usually seen where we have a Windows server and then
you use a special tool called remote desktop connection.
And then I use remote desktop connection I type in the IP address of the name of the computer and I
get a screen very similar to what you just saw.
And that works great.
And by the way that's protocol RDP and runs on port 3389,
make sure you know that for the test. When you're not using servers what we do instead is we do a remote
help.
So what's happened here is somebody has gone into their system and they did remote assistance and they've
created a invitation for me to connect to a particular system and they send it to me via e-mail.
So I've got this and then I can actually create the connection.
Once I made that I pretty much just click on the invitation and it takes care of it for me.
So now you can see using RDP
I'm able to connect to a remote system just as easily.
So there's a lot of different ways to do these types of remote desktops.
Microsoft really wants you to do the Windows way using the RDP protocol and the built in tools that
they have.
But if you want really cross-platform performance I'm a big big fan of TightVNC. For the exam
just remember the port numbers. TightVNC running on port 5900 and RDP running on port 33
89.