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Remote Access for IT Consultants
By admin | February 3, 2008
As an IT Consultant distance is one of your greatest enemies. You can only work for people that you can reach. That means you are limited to working with people in your general geographic area. With remote access tools you greatly expand your potential clientèle, and with the right remote tools you can do anything short of hardware installation.
The suite of remote tools I personally use are Ultra VNC, Remote Task Manager, Look@LAN, and Skype. I will address each of those tools briefly in this article, and more in depth in individual reviews. I keep the entire setup on both CD and my Flash drive for easy installation. I can also mail copies of the CD to potential clients or make the files available for download through my website.
Ultra VNC is the most obviously useful component of my remote access suite. Once it is installed on the client PC you can access the PC just as if you were sitting in front of it. When Ultra VNC is installed as a service you don’t even need a user to log on for you. From here you can troubleshoot any issues the client is having with the PC.
Remote Task Manager is the most powerful tool in the package in my opinion. It allows you to access the task manager, the services list, and the event viewer, as well as execute programs remotely. RTM can kill processes that the normal task manager can’t as well, which has proven invaluable to me in the past. It’s also less intrusive than UltraVNC for times when you may need to make an adjustment to a PC without disturbing the user. You will need an administrative password to install the RTM service on the client PC, but it installs silently and runs without bothering the users.
Look@LAN is a very fast and very powerful network discovery tool. It will give you all of the active IPs on the network as well as MAC addresses, open ports, ping times, and traceroutes. If SNMP is enabled it will also access the SNMP Data and display all kind of system info.
Skype is a well known and popular tool for video conferencing. I use it to meet with distant clients who like face to face contact. Those meetings are what really sell you as a consultant, so this piece of software can do more to make you money than any of the others.
Obviously maintaining a remote presence at a client requires a working internet connection at both ends and it helps to have a tech savvy user at the remote site in case you need to talk a user through something, but these tools will let you do an amazing amount of work from thousands of miles away. Everything from desktop troubleshooting to server configuration is at your fingertips.
Pro Tip: Don’t worry about trying to forward ports for every machine on the network. Just get make sure RDP is forwarded to the server and install your tools there. If your client doesn’t have a server then designate one as the “Helpdesk” PC that must remain on all the time and forward your Ultra VNC port to that PC and install your tools on it.
As always please
if this article helped you.Topics: consultant, february, helpdesk, remote control, software |
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