Ask Slashdot: Best App For Android For Remote Access To Mac Or PC?

An anonymous reader writes "Hi, I need to get remote access to my home Mac and Windows PC. At home, it's basically for watching TV, whereas at the office, I need it to work on files I am not allowed to take out when leaving. I know there's a lot of choice out there, but I need something free and reliable. What do you all recommend?"

Comments

Easy

[mog007]

TeamViewer. It's free and easy.

Re:Easy

[zugmeister]

On the plus side it's open, runs on everything (server and client), and free. I use it as the failover from MSTS (mac client sucks) or ARD (which has no PC client).

On the minus side, it's not fast so remote admin is fine but movies mostly unwatchable. No sound. No file xfer or printer sharing. It doesn't tunnel, so you are looking at a minimum of a VPN tunnel (or piggyback it off a ssh tunnel is you wanna be geeky) should you want access while off the server's network. DO NOT PORT FORWARD VNC TO THE WORLD! It does not have strong security (8 character pw no username) and the VNC data itself is not secured.

Note that there are proprietary versions of VNC that address some of these issues.

Team Viewer

[alta]

I use teamviewer. Free for personal use. Does what you need.

Drive my kids nuts when they're on the computer and Daddy randomly connect to see what the heck they're doing. Keeps them on their toes and off questionable sites. With the help of opendns... I'll eventually put in a proxy when they get older though. Preserving what innocence I can...

RDP

[gbjbaanb]

Microsoft's built-in remote display technology.

The best RDP client for Android is Remote RDP

For the MAC, you could install xrdp which provides the same protocol to access linux/osx.

RDP is a very lightweight protocol, originally created by Citrix way back and bought or licenced by Microsoft, as they do with the bits of Windows that are any good.

Re:RDP

[Guspaz]

Microsoft's new RDP client is pretty fantastic. They bought out some company that made a cross-platform RDP client: I've tried both the OS X version and the iOS version (primarily on my iPhone, but also on my iPad), and overall it's worked extremely well. Better than the Windows client, dare I say. It's also available on Android.

Two big advantages for me on the iPhone: it's very fast (and seems to support some sort of progressive image compression that leads to low latency for getting something up on screen but still high quality as it loads in higher res imagery after) and has a very nice trackpad-like control option. For that mode, you basically can use the screen of the phone as if it were a touchpad, moving around a cursor. This works far better than the usual method most RDP clients use where you just tap on the screen where you want it to click. That's super inaccurate on a phone, while the trackpad style lets you be sure of where you're clicking.

I don't want to say that there aren't other clients supporting all this stuff, just that I've tried Microsoft's new clients and they work pretty darned well.

Re:Files... Not Allowed to Take?

[pr0fessor]

I was reminded of a time when I had to do exactly that... It was an awkward situation where an entry level {hourly wage} employee had already placed a request for remote access but had been been denied by his management.

I like go getters that are willing to put in some extra time to do a good job but if the company doesn't want you taking files home and won't give you remote access then chances are you shouldn't be looking for a way to do it.