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Apple Remote Desktop Released
A user writes "Apple Remote Desktop provides remote administration and viewing for Macs. It works back to Mac OS 8.1, over the Internet, provides remote software updates, system checks, screen locking and more. Sweet." Sweet indeed. I could use this for my home network (right now consisting of five Macs, going on six). The cost is $299 for 10 clients, $499 for unlimited clients.
But the protocol VNC uses is just weird -- as near as I can tell, the client sends raw keystrokes & mouse positions and clicks and so on, and the remote server sends raw bitmaps. The division of labor there between the client, the server, and the strain on the network is far from optimal (but it makes the cross platform stuff possible, so I'm not knocking it). As I understand things, X11 deals with these issues by having the remote "client" send vector data to the local "server", which handles all the drawing work. If you can compare it, protocols like HTTP take this even further by having the client pass parameters to the server, which parses them and sends back, essentally, html "source code" to the browser which figures out what to do with everything it gets. In both X11 and HTTP, you trade low network burden for high network throughput, while VNC does almost no work on the client end and tries to cram lots of data back & forth across the wire -- and since bandwidth is usually a bigger bottleneck than CPU or RAM power, it's not such a great use of available resources.
And this is why I'm wondering how this protocol works. Is it an older protocol in newer clothing? (I read the posts about it being a new version of an old Apple program, but that just shunts the question: how did *it* work?) Is it related to X11, or some kind of NeXT technology? Is it related to SNMP or NetInfo? Or is it just VNC with a snazzy interface? As interesting as it looks, I wouldn't spend the money on it before being able to learn more about it...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I'd be really surprised if Apple Remote Desktop did anything other than send 'raw bitmaps' across the network. Considering the range of GUI applications the user can run on his machine there wouldn't be a viable 'vector' based protocol (you'd need something that could cope with Cocoa, Carbon (in both varieties), Classic and even Java).
They might have done something clever and used the built-in Cocoa Distributed Objects (which rock btw) and just proxy your GUI widgets off of another computer. That would keep the bandwidth costs down for Aqua. But considering all the real apps (IE, Office, Adobe *) are all Carbon apps anyway there wouldn't be much to gain.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
Does this mean Apple may be looking at a real thin client solution, maybe?
Citrix makes platform-independent desktops for Windows and Unix (Solaris only last I checked, but that's been awhile). Also, LTSP is out there for Linux. I'd love to be able to buy a beefy Mac and be able to have multiple sessions running from it, especially if the client was platform-independent.
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
</speculation>
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
The specs of the Apple Remote Desktop don't mention any security / encryption, yet they suggest using it over the internet.
How secure is it? Are the streams of data encrypted?
Or is only the authentication secure?
Some of you might know as it seems to be a new version of Apple Network Assistant which is part of AppleShareIP.
(BTW this is much more than VNC or Timbuktu, it has lots of administration features, like mirroring HDs, etc. the remote display is just the tip of the iceberg.)