Dan,
I agree. I am still learning how best to use VNC and a couple of things
have helped me:
1) If you are connecting to other less techy people, have them install
RealVNC w/o changing any options and then have them do a reverse connection
to you and then you can set the options for them. Yes, this still can be
challenging for some users but it does eliminate access to their router as
a problem.
2) EchoVNC. It sounds like this might do what you want. The real downside
to this, IMHO, is that groups need to be set up by an administrator ahead
of time. Either you need to set up a different group for any two people
that want to connect to each other or you need to set up generically named
groups and give out the passwords to everyone. Or am I missing something?
At 12:35 AM 8/21/2005, you wrote:
I love VNC. I recommend it to all my friends and
relatives. I use it to remotely administer their
machines. But... I'm a network hacker, and I
find it easy to do things like figure out peoples'
IP addresses by looking at their email headers.
It turns out that's important when using VNC widely,
and this is a problem.
People somewhat less technical than me have lots
of trouble using VNC, and I am forever having
to help them get it up and running again.
These same people have no problems using GotoMyPC,
and they tend to give up on VNC and use GotoMyPC,
paying the $5/month, just because it lets them
get work done with less hassle than VNC.
I'm not alone in thinking VNC is hard to use; see e.g.
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_07/open-source-product.html
So... what can be done about this?
A usability study would be a good first step.
Informally, I suspect the main problems are
1) Confusing setup. Too many options.
2) Having to know the IP address of the machine you want to connect to.
3) Firewall problems are hard to diagnose.
I suspect that a rendezvous server that runs
on a public web site would help with some of these
issues. For example, an easy-to-install PHP-based
rendezvous server could let webmasters add a way
to start or join VNC sessions by going to their
web site, and diagnose common firewall problems.
This might be quite easy to write. Perhaps it
could even launch the VNC viewer and server modules
by using the web browser's helper app feature.
I'd love to code this myself, but my time's pretty limited.
Is anyone else thinking along these lines already?
Thanks,
Dan
--
Trying to get a job as a c++ developer? See
http://kegel.com/academy/getting-hired.html
_______________________________________________
VNC-List mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To remove yourself from the list visit:
http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO
September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices
Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA
Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf
_______________________________________________
Echovnc-users mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/echovnc-users
