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.

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In my day I’ve seen more than my share of passwords taped to the bottom of keyboards, written on sticky notes on the monitor, or scribbled hastily on a notepad. I’ve even see text files on peoples desktops containing the passwords to their banking websites. If anyone reading this thinks that’s a good thing you definitely should put into place the practices I’m about to outline in this article.

The basic premise of a password is that it is a SECRET. No one else should know your passwords. And yes, I said passwordS plural, with an “S” on the end. Every password you have for every site that you deem important should be different. And your throwaway password should be different from all of those. I can already hear the gnashing of teeth after that last sentence, “remembering all of those passwords is impossible! I’ll forget them all and be locked out of everything!”. SILENCE PEASANTS! The Emperor will show you the way.

The secret to maintaining secure passwords and still being able to remember them all is a Password Schema. To create a Password Schema you first choose a five word phrase, our example will be “The Best Five Word Phrase”. Now we head on over to the “Leet” Speak Translator and convert that phrase into letters, numbers, and symbols. What I get for our example phrase is “7|-|3 b3$7 pH1\/3 \/\/0rD p|-|r4$3″. Some of those symbols aren’t valid password characters, so we will have to clean it up a bit. The final result is “7H3 b3$7 pH1V3 W0rD pHr@$3″. This is the basis for every password we are going to make. This phrase is what you can write down. Ideally you only write down the unconverted phrase, but if you aren’t familiar with “Leet” speak conversions you can safely write down the converted phrase.

The next step is to choose a separator character. I like to use ! for my separator. You can use any symbol which is valid for a password field. Generally ! @ # $ % ^ and & are all valid.

Now to generate a password with this phrase. I chose as our example website Bank of America. We have 3 words to work with, Bank, Of, and America, so our password will have three sections. We start it off with our separator character !, then we take the first vowel in the first word, bank. So we use the first word in our phrase 7H3. So far our password looks like this !7H3. Now add another ! and take the first vowel in the second word, of, so our next password part is the fourth vowel (A E I O U) which means it will use the fourth word in our phrase, W0rD. The password has become !7H3!W0rD. Now the last word is America, the first vowel is A again. So one more separator character and the final part of our password is 7H3, then the closing ! and you have your new Bank of America password which is “!7H3!W0rD!7H3!”. That password will pass even the most rigorous security analysis. It is impossible to guess and very resistant to cracking attempts. It’s also easy to remember. You know your phrase, and you know how the phrase is applied so you never need to remember a password again. Just write down your pass phrase and start generating secure passwords.

For a quick reference breakdown here is how the schema works in a nutshell:

Separator: !

Base Phrase: The Best Five Word Phrase

Translated Phrase: 7H3 b3$7 pH1V3 W0rD pHr@$3

Vowel Assignment:   A    E    I     O    U

Site Name:    Bank Of America

Final Password: !7H3!W0rd!7H3!

If your banking and personal information is really important to you, then I strongly recommend using this approach. Your middle name and the last 4 digits of your SSN is NOT a secure password.

If you found this to be helpful then please

This is Friday, so no tech article. Instead I’ll be dropping a few comments on the biggest Technology news of the past week. In my mind three items topped the news this past week. The first item was of course the Fiber Optic cables that have been cut around the middle east and Asia.

The current situation is that three cables have been cut, two initially and now a third. For the details on the cuts head over to MarketWatch. Iran is completely cut off from the internet. Egypt, India, and many other parts of the mid east are experiencing huge traffic jams. A quick jaunt over the Internet Traffic Report shows 100% packet loss to Iran. It could take weeks for the cables to be repaired and India’s technology outsourcing firms are taking a big hit trying to reroute their traffic. This is a big test of the Internet’s ability to route around failure and I’m interested in seeing how it shakes out.

The second big issue that caught my attention was Microsoft’s bid to purchase Yahoo. A purchase of this magnitude would put Microsoft in solid shape to challenge Google as the reigning king of the search engine market as well as add yet another revenue stream to the MSFT powerhouse. What it would mean to the rest of us is not yet clear, though you can be certain it would involve Yahoo Toolbar being pre-installed with IE in the future. Regardless, the deal requires EU and US approval so we won’t know anything more for at least a few days, and likely not for several weeks.

The last item I picked up on this week was the fact that we apparently know the identity of the Storm Worm Network operator, and he is supposedly being protected by the Russian government. At least they don’t seem to be cooperating in bringing him to justice.