pcAnywhere let anyone anywhere inject code into PCs

Or indeed

windows remote desktop ?

I'll remind you

Back in the day, companies didn't have TCP/IP as it was hard to configure. Furthermore setting up a Remote Access Server with Windows and TCP/IP was to hard for most companies.

PC Anywhere simply allowed you to slam an ISDN card or modem into your Server and dial it up with minimal configuration. It was, more or less, a plug and play solution. Plus it offered file transfers (sometimes limited in speed to a few hundred bytes per second) and a 1-Bit mode which reduced the image to black and white which really sped things up a lot.

Of course by today there is little need for PC Anywhere. Everything it does can be done cheaper and more convenient with other methods. I guess some companies just kept it installed. I'm sure there are still companies using it over ISDN.

PC Anywhere Banned?

All non-aproved remote access software is banned where I work. It's RDP, X, SSH, Proliant iLO or nothing.

To be honest, I used to work for a company in the days of NT4 and PCA was an essential product. MS released RDP for remote admin in Win2000, but what had actually killed PCA off for us was the then Compaq Lights Out board which was far more functional than any other remote access solution.

Your properly configured firewall...

...may be set up to filter on source of the port, via IP address, mac address, etc.

Re: How does a firewall prevent a buffer overflow

Hmmm, the way I read it, I thought by setting max packet length

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 5631 -m length --length $maxlength: -j DROP

Or something like that. But as the article says, it would be stupid to rely on this. I'm also wondering if commercial (hardware) firewall vendors would include this kind of fine grained rules per default. I somehow doubt it, but it would be interesting to ask.

It was slow when I used it...

...but that was over a dialup modem.

And that might not have been a fast one.

It was a cool program that allowed us to check the health of a factory at the other end of the UK without the required flights.

And secure too. The factory only plugged the modem into the phone line when we told them to.

Mostly do to Windows and modem speed.

Used it a fair bit at my last job. When Symantec acquired Altiris, they made PCAnywhere the remote control agent for the deployment management suite. It put less load on the cpu of the local pc than the "emergency" remote solution which was directly implemented in the deployment console. Since the agent was sitting on the local net, PCAnywhere ran as quickly as any other remote solutions we'd used in the past.