SunWorld: VNC works miracles for system administrators

“Think about the common telephone calls you get, asking for
help: someone needs a Web server reconfigured, or the fonts on an
engineering workstation look bad, or a rogue process has gone
sociopathic and is thrashing swap space, or the Toronto office
wants to see for itself the project management calculations Atlanta
did. One of the great charms of Unix has always been that it allows
you to manage all these operations from a distance. Sometimes that
distance is no greater than the length of a hallway in your office
building; these days, however, such work can be done almost as
easily if your terminal happens to be a continent away from the
malfunctioning computer.”

“That happy picture has a few rough spots, though: using Windows
or Mac OS desktops to monitor Unix has never been entirely
convenient with the standard tools installed on the personal
computing (PC) desktops — and it’s even more difficult to go the
other way. Performing remote administration of PC operating systems
is difficult and dicey even with expensive software add-ons. For
these purposes, computer-human interfaces come in two varieties:
command line, and windows-icons-menus-pointers (WIMP). It’s always
been possible to submit command lines to a Unix host from a
distance. In the Internet Protocol age, this has generally meant
launching a telnet client and logging in directly to Unix. Going
the opposite way — sending command lines to a personal computing
desktop remotely — has generally meant buying software that is
proprietary and fragile.”

“…Now, however, you can eliminate that complexity and expense
from your life. Virtual network computing (VNC) delivers much of
the functionality of these other components, in a single,
high-performance, free-of-charge, open source package. Dr. Quentin
Stafford-Fraser, staff research scientist for AT&T Laboratories
Cambridge, thinks about VNC in terms of personal liberation: “You
are freed from sitting in front of the machine you want to work on.
You are freed from sitting in front of a machine of the same type
as the one you want to work on. You are freed from the hassle of
logging in and out, and restarting all your applications.”

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