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.

Comments

Re:No dual licenses?

[Praxxis]

While it is not a robust and does not come with all the bells and whistles, you may want to consider using OSXvnc. It's free, provides basic desktop access via a VNC client or Web Browers, and did I mention it's free.

Check it out; http://www.osxvnc.com/

Re:No dual licenses?

[nachoman]

And for those who don't know, VNC (the official version) IS available for old version of mac OS (both for 64K and PPC processors). Oh, and it works with Linux and windows too. http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

I've used VNC a lot of linux, windows and a bit on the mac. It works great and you can't beat the price.

Re:Free & open competition

[babbage]

As I pointed out myself (well, indirectly I guess), I use VNC on OSX more or less every day. I like it, for the most part, but, well, it's lightweight and it feels lightweight. It's easy to find small clients for almost any platform -- that's a huge plus. You can run it over SSH for instant encryption, and that's another plus.

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...