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Remote Possibilities
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October 10, 2002
By Sean Doherty and Dilip Advani, Saurabh Bhasin, Julio Caraballo and Bilson M. Poikayil
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"You can't be in two places at the same time" was once an immutable law of nature. But it no longer holds true for IT shops practicing the art of remote control. Remote-control products let you maintain servers and bring IT expertise to distant users' desktops.
We tested products that display remote desktops through a window on a master machine and that transfer keyboard and mouse signals back to the remote, or host, system. Altiris, Binary Research International, Computer Associates International, CrossTec, Funk Software, LapLink, Linktivity, Microsoft, Netopia, NetSupport, Novell, Previo, Symantec, Tridia, TWD Industries, uRoam and Vector Networks were invited to submit products. Out of this crowded field, all 17 agreed to participate, though CA never sent a product or told us why it was dropping out.
By Any Other Name
Depending on the vendor, the IT administrator's or remote user's machine is called a "client," "guest" or "master," and the system to be manipulated is called a "host" or "slave." For purposes of this article, we'll use the terms master and host. Some vendors provide code for both the master and host machines; others support Web-based remote control, obviating installing proprietary code on users' systems. The latter scenario paves the way for better remote control from handheld devices.
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Traditional remote-control software includes file-transfer functions along with remote-control capabilities. But to distinguish themselves in a crowded market, vendors are adding components usually found in desktop-management suites. For example, NetSupport Manager provides hardware and software inventories as well as support for SNMP and Wake-on-LAN. Conversely, some remote-control products, such as Altiris Carbon Copy and Novell's Remote Management Agent, are part of desktop-management suites. If you are considering a desktop management solution or use Altiris Client Management Suite or Novell ZENworks, you won't find any of the best-of-breed products a compelling alternative to the remote-control component included in those packages. But you wouldn't want to purchase these packages just for remote control.
Secure Communications
Each product we tested provides options for encrypting authentication schemes and data streams, but it's misleading to make security comparisons across the board. For example, NetSupport uses 56- to 256-bit DES (Digital Encryption Standard) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption, while pcAnywhere uses Microsoft's default CSP (Cryptographic Service Provider) and RC4 encryption. In the long run, though, no encryption scheme is unbreakable. If the authentication scheme is compromised, that's a critical flaw. However, if the data stream is intercepted, that's not as critical because traffic contains only screen updates. We verified that no clear text passed on the wire when encryption was enabled and tested common security features, such as lockout, connection restrictions and file-access permissions.
Whether you use a modem-to-modem connection or a LAN connection with remote control, you're bound to encounter communication errors. We tested a program's ability to detect and recover from communication errors (error detection and recovery). No applications could identify the disconnect immediately, and only half provided an error message before closing the session. Most returned to the client application. However, TWD's Remote-Anything abends, while LapLink's remote control and pcAnywhere's file-transfer programs were the most stubborn--they just sat there and let the user think he or she was still connected. Novell's Remote Manager identified the disconnect quickly, but the host was not usable until after a reboot. Both NetSupport and CrossTec provide keep-alive functions. NetSupport ticks hosts every 18 seconds and identifies a remote-control-session disconnect within approximately 43 seconds. When the tick is timed every 1 second, it identifies disconnects within 30 seconds.
Server administrators will be tickled by many of these products' features, such as a master's ability to broadcast files to a number of hosts and directory integration to set up remote control in the enterprise with the same users and groups used for account management. Altiris and Symantec both offer host code that can be installed without a reboot, ideal for mission-critical servers. Unique to this roundup, Altiris also provides asynchronous and synchronous modes for remote control. The synchronous option offers screen updates in real time, while the asynchronous mode scans the remote display and updates display changes only. The asynchronous setting provided ideal performance for viewing Java applications.
During our tests Altiris bought Previo's eSupport Essentials technology, including Remote Assistant. Altiris says it will offer eSupport Essentials PC recovery utilities but considers Carbon Copy its remote-control solution of choice, replacing Remote Assistant. This removed Previo from the competition. In addition, Vector Networks licenses the NetSupport product and resells it as PC-Duo. PC-Duo looks and feels exactly like NetSupport Manager. Hence, we did not test PC-Duo but gave it the benefit of NetSupport Manager's performance results. We also did not include it in our report card. We did, however, scrutinize the feature set and included that information in our features chart.
Our Editor's Choice award goes to NetSupport Manager 7. NetSupport offers optimal performance in a full-featured remote-control application with plenty of enterprise-level configuration, installation and management options. Although it did not receive top scores in raw performance testing, NetSupport supplied the right mix of performance and features. It edged out second place CrossTec's NetOp Remote Control by providing hardware and software inventories, audio chat and host support for multiple inbound connections. And though third-place finisher Symantec pcAnywhere provides directory integration, NetSupport maintains support for DOS, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Win16 and Win32 systems and provides administrators with a "client scanning" feature to scroll through multiple desktops in a single window. These three products are profiled below. Read about the others we tested online.
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