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S N E A K P R E V I E W

RemotelyAnywhere Simplifies Administration From Afar

August 23, 1999
The next option I tried, Performance, provides a number of useful tools to help administrators analyze the performance of their NT box. These tools display various details about CPU loads, memory utilization, open communication ports, open files, and registry keys and DLLs in use.

The third RemotelyAnywhere option, Remote Control, not only allowed me to see the screen of the NT host, but also let me control that host with the mouse and keyboard of the remote machine.

Because the NT machine's screen is displayed as a graphic image within the browser environment on the remote computer, I never was confused as to whether I was operating in local mode or remote-control mode--a problem I had encountered when using other remote-control utilities.


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Next, I tested the Processes, Services and Drivers options. As their names imply, these options display a list of all user processes, system services or system drivers, respectively, and let you view detailed information about them. I was able to kill any process with a mouse click, or start and stop system services and drivers as necessary. These capabilities are especially useful when an application crashes or goes into a deadlocked state, or if you need to test the compatibility of an application with various combinations of system services and drivers.

I found the Task Scheduler option helpful in letting me add and remove tasks from the NT box's process scheduler. I could do this without having to stand at the host's keyboard. The Event Viewer and Registry Editor options were helpful for the same reason--it's useful to check the NT event log or modify the Windows registry from a remote location.

But Reboot is the RemotelyAnywhere feature I found more beneficial than any other. It let me reboot an NT server remotely in one of two modes. The normal mode gives all running applications the opportunity to terminate gracefully and write unsaved data to disk before the system shut-down process is completed. The emergency mode immediately initiates the system bootstrap loader without notifying any active program. This is especially useful when a critical application has failed and it's of the utmost importance to get it restarted quickly.

A Couple of Caveats
Although my overall impression of RemotelyAnywhere was very good, there were some problems. For example, I was unable to access my NT host from home with my secure dial-in account because the corporate firewall prohibits external access to any secure system through a nonstandard communications port, such as RemotelyAnywhere's default Port 2000.

In addition, the RemotelyAnywhere client applet did not operate correctly from all locations within the corporate firewall. On certain workstations, the client appeared to connect correctly with the NT host, but some options, including Remote Control, did not function as expected. These failures, if not corrected in the finished version, could present serious problems.

E. Shane Turner is a senior software engineer with MCI WorldCom in Colorado Springs, Colo. Send your comments on this article to him at shane.turner@wcom.com.

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