For a long time my parents stayed away from PCs. My dad had to work with a PC during his last working years. After retirement I configured a three year old PC (without Internet connection) for the standard word processing tasks. But this system remained mostly untouched. Some 3 years ago the moment came and he called me, that he wanted to get Internet. He didn’t know what it meant, but somehow he wanted to get “it”. As we live some 100 km apart it became clear to me that some “remote support” solution was needed. The phone as medium just wasn’t enough.

In the past I had mostly relied on some kind of VPN connection to remote support. And as up- and downstream speeds got better, this also seemed to be the solution for my dad.

The latest thing that in 2006 came to my attention was a virtual VPN service called Hamachi.

Basically I prepared another PC for my dad, this time with Microsoft Windows  XP, Office, a Antivirus product and a Hamachi Client plus UltraVNC. I tried to lock down my dads account as much as possible. The VNC daemon was started through a service operation on a admin account. Intentionally dad didn’t get admin privileges.

This solution worked perfectly well for a couple of month and stopped at some point. Sometimes dads system was not online via Hamachi, in other instances I could see that the system was online, but couldn’t log on to VNC. What was originally intended as a solution to support, became more and more a problem in itself. One day it took nearly two hours to get the remote access solution going, while the original problem was solved in two minutes.

So I started to look into other solutions.  Some of my requirements where:

• Cost effective
• Transparent  to the network configuration
• No installation required on the remote systems
• Simple to initiate on the remote site

I finally came up with Teamviewer which met all the above listed requirements plus its multi-platform, runs on Windows and MacOS. So after my big shift to OSX I can support dad on his Windows systems (He bought a netbook last Dec!) while sitting in front of my Mac.

Teamviewer is for me currently the remote support solution. So far it had no issues with the underlying network. Even connections via HSDPA worked pretty well. Plus it doesn’t require any installation on the remote side. I just send out the link to the client and my dad or my friends just download the latest version of the app, start it and tell me the necessary codes to log in. I hope that they’ll provide an iPhone admin console soon, so that I can help even while on the road.

-PTL-