I think Mark had installed Ultra VNC on one of our computers in the office before, but I hadn’t really looked at it that closely until now. There are a couple interesting things about Ultra VNC.
It supports Windows Domain Logons. This means we would not have to worry about figuring out the VNC password on a machine.
It supports session encryption. It has built in file-transfer, and chat system. This is not so much an issue since we have a VPN, but Ultra VNC allows you to setup a repeater or NAT to NAT connectors to work around the problems associated with NAT routing.
A really interesting feature is called Singleclick. It allows you to provide a weblink to a user who doesn’t have VNC installed, they downloaded a minimal 300K distribution of UltraVNC, which then does a reverse connection to your system, but shares their machine. This might especially be useful for helping our laptop users.
The big downside is there are no Mac or Linux clients. But like most flavors of VNC it has a built in Java viewer you access via a web-browser. And this java version supports all the MS Logon, encryption, and file transfer features too.
The big question is speed, I have found the only VNC Server to give decent performance by way of Java client so far to be Real VNC. So I will definitely be doing some testing with Ultra VNC to see how it performs. But if this goes well, I’m thinking this may be our new default VNC software.
April 6th, 2006 at 1:00 am
That is a good list of features. I’m especially interested about the DC logins and encryption. I always feel very guilty logging in over vnc cause that is a pretty secure password that get’s thrown around clear text.