Hi,
I’ve been using UltraVNC for a while and while commenting on an article on UnixTutorials, I thought it would be a good idea to share my knowledge. First, I must say that UltraVNC is a free version of VNC that has more features than the free version of RealVNC (thanks for sharing the code, though…). It supports encryption and Active Directory authentication, and a few other nice features.
But what I want to talk about today is the Single-Click feature (SC). Very useful… Example situation: One of your client went to a foreign country and he wants to configure the e-mail client of a laptop he borrowed there. VNC is not installed. You can spend an hour telling him over the phone how to configure Outlook or Thunderbird, or just tell him to go to your website, download a single executable, and take control of the PC and configure it.
How to proceed:
- Make sure the VNC (or UltraVNC, for the rest of the text) viewer is loaded on your computer, in listen mode. You can access a shortcut in the start menu for that. It will then listen on port 5500 for incoming connections from a VNC server.
- Set your firewall so that it forwards port 5500 TCP to your machine (may be usefull to have a DHCP reservation, to avoid problems).
- If you don’t have a static IP address with your ISP, you should open a free account with Dyndns to get a FQDN that always points to your IP address, even when it changes.
- Create an UltraVNC executable. Go to http://www.uvnc.com/addons/singleclick.html for the instructions. Basically, you download a zipped template, you edit the configuration file (helpdesk.txt) for your setup (the only mandatory edit is to tell your IP address/FQDN, the rest is aesthetic. Once your edit is ok, you then go to the UltraVNC Creator Tool, and it will make you an executable out of your config.
- You send the .exe to your family and friends, or, even better, you put it up on your website, so that anyone who has access to the internet can download the file. Internet connexion is a requirement for remote control over the internet, after all, so they shouldn’t have problem downloading the file!
- Once it is downloaded, the user has to execute the file, then select the desired options (Tech support from home, from office, with encryption or not…) since in one executable, you can configure more than one targets.
- You are now prompted if you want to accept or not the remote control request.
- If you like the product, think about donating to the UltraVNC team (I’m not one of them, and, yes, I did donate).
Limitations:
- The executable is linked to one set of targets, you cannot change it without creating a new executable.
- You must have control over the firewall protecting your private network.
- It takes some time to create and fine-tune the executable, but it is definitely worth it!
I hope this is all clear. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them here, I’ll be glad to answer them.
* By the way, if VNC is installed on the remote machine and steps 1 and 2 are done, you can just tell the remote user to right-click on the VNC server icon in the system tray and select “Add new client”. Then they just put your FQDN or IP address (you can use http://whatismyip.org to find it out) in the hostname field, then click ok. You’re directly connected, no prompt.
