Solutions?
Until ~'97 it was rsh, from then ssh.
Simples.
Working remotely: What are the solutions?
It’s funny how far mobile computing has come in the last ten years. It enables a flexibility of working that only a decade ago could have been considered by some to be in the realm of Star Trek. Notebooks and smartphones are well understood, while new waves of ultraportable computers such as netbooks and tablets (where are …
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Tuesday 11th May 2010 15:37 GMT Ned Leprosy
Depressing
Sigh: what I find really depressing about remote working isn't the technology choices or lack thereof, but that PHBs still form the biggest obstacle. "If we can't shoulder-surf, we don't believe you're doing any work", regardless of whatever one may or may not produce.
As for the technology itself, back in the day I had a kilostream and a pair of DEC bridges, the remote one needing resetting by an IT bod on average twice a day, leading me to regret not choosing the much bigger and uglier router instead. Access to the intarwebs (such as it was) was provided gratis by the company through their network, which was a workable solution in terms of their own data integrity and kept everyone happy provided I didn't do anything that would also get me booted off an ISP.
But that was 18 years ago, and thanks to the observation in the first paragraph, I've had little chance to see how things have progressed in that time.
Maybe someone should sell the resulting lack of commuting as a "green" issue... nah, it'd make a difference so it would never work.
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Tuesday 11th May 2010 15:37 GMT André Marques
With all due respect to all Unix supporters...
...looking at that penguin's face is now synonymous with F******* idiotic comments from Ubuntu freetards that wouldn't know what business requirements were if they were flogged to death with them (and that's what I feel like doing to those poor penguins thanks to gems like these)!
Moving on topic, in some of our clients (really small businesses with heavy mobility requirements) we have started to trial Remote App with some very promissing results.
Users are mostly happy, with the easy to use login from anywhere, everything running fast with a humble VM as a backbone and easy and fast access to network volumes as well as local disks.
I'm just trying to find a way to make Easy Print, the theoretical brilliant solution to the remote printing problem, to stop messing around randomly with characters in printed docs...
VPNs are good, great with those "magic box" WAN acceleration packages, but in the SMB market I'm in no one can afford them, and there's no way to split the cost among our clients.
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Tuesday 11th May 2010 16:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
salesforce.com
provides our biggest problem, use VPN to get people access to their emails and docs (when windows offline files plays ball - better now we're starting to roll out Windows 7 but a pain in the neck before that). Syncing salesforce using the outlook connect app is a right headache for all concerned though. I think this is due to the poor upload speeds given by most home ISP's coupled with each remote user having upwards of 1000 contacts to sync. not found an easy and cheap way around it so far though...
anon as the company has strange policies about online activity etc...
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Wednesday 12th May 2010 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Whitepapers / Guides
This article does not really say anything that would help people make a decision on particular products or services. Basically it says you need to look at this, this and this.
Having started a business over the last year with three people in three different locations I have come up against a lot of the issues mentioned.
It could be worth making a few Reg guides of How To - from actual vendor options to setup and implementation. Things that need to be considered are
File access - With either replication, cloud service offline and online
Documents on multiple mahcines - MS Office, Google Docs
Mail Setup - Hosted exchange/ google apps
Comms - VOIP, physical phones, mobiles
All these things need to be integrated and fully functional when trying to let people work from anywhere.
Just a thought
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Wednesday 12th May 2010 17:22 GMT Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
VPNs
I have to say the quality of the VPN applications has improved over the years, we use the Vodafone VRAC remote access client, but it takes me nearly 17 minutes to login from power up (power up laptop, login in to laptop, start windows, login into windows, start VRAC app, login to VRAC). Cumbersome but at least with broadband it’s reasonably quick. In a previous job I once logged in on a dialup line and it took MickySoft outlook 5.5 hours to resync my email!!!!!!
Now if only MickySoft didn't keep fucking up my roaming profile when login on different machines.
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Friday 14th May 2010 14:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Small businesses just need some pragmatism
We use Draytek Vigor routers for VPN - they also do VOIP options if you want it (we use Skype instead) and can have two broadband links. To control our server remotely for a single connection (it gets you on as the console) I prefer RADMIN - the server end is peanuts, the clients are free and the bandwidth is very low - I've even used it on a 40k dial up. You can tune the colour bit-level to help the bandwidth. It gives the added advantage if two of you connect to the RADMIN server you can both see and work on the same session.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
