remote connect

[Abbadon]

Hi all,

I've recently saved an old system from the scrapyard which is running as a little datawarehouse / fileserver / downloadserver on my network here. It doesn't have a screen, which is good because there isn't room for one.

At the moment I'm using winvnc to connect to it, but it seems a bit sluggish. Any other suggestions for software for remote acces?

[pave_spectre]

Depends what exactly you need to do with it, what level of control you want over it.

Have you thought about setting up an ftp server on it. There are numerous free lightweight FTP server programs available.

Whether or not something runs sluggishly on it, will depend on just how old the hardware is and what is specs are.

[Abbadon]

The system itself is an old 333mhz pentium with 384mb of pc133 ram running W2K with SP4. So that may account for the sluggishness, but while working on it directly (hooking up a screen & such) there was no sluggishness to be seen.

Most of the time I don't need actual control over it & I can get by with a couple of drivemappings to access the content.

But I also run WinMX and Bittorent on it (since it sits in the hallway where it can make all the noise it wants all trough the night without disturbing anyone) so sometimes I actually need to "see the screen & click the buttons" over the network. And since it is continualy online, there are of course the necesairy updates & scans to be done. It's in this part, when I connect with vnc, that I would like some smoother workings.

Is there perhaps a way to access just one application over the network in stead of the entire desktop?

[pave_spectre]

The sluggishness of remote control software is probably mostly due to the network connection rather than the hardware specs of the machine.

Even viewing a 1gig celeron from an 1800XP, gave me noticeable lag in response using several programs.

The one I ended up using most was called Remote Desktop, (I think, I'll have to check since I havent used it in a while), which allowed a limited configuration of what resolution the remote viewing was done in, which meant it was possible to reduce the amount of data needing to be sent across the network connection increasing the response time.

Or a Gigabit network might make a noticeable improvement. :D

[pave_spectre]

I was wrong about the name of the program I used, it was called Remote Administrator (http://www.famatech.com/). Its a pay product.

[Abbadon]

They seem to have a free trial version. Thx pave! I'll give it a run tonight...