Creating VNC wrapper

[marc]

I work for a small tech company that uses remote support for our
customers. We currently have a support software that is a VNC wrapper
basically and are looking to migrate to a new solution that allows us
to connect over ports 80 and 443, not the 5500 it currently does. We
could do this 2 ways.
1. Purchase a solution online that is already set up for user
friendliness, file transfer, encryption, etc.

2. Or to save money, develop our own wrapper that can be used to
accomplish reliable support that is relatively easy to set up for each
connection, without the customer and us having to jump through many
hoops and command line commands just to get a connection up and
running.

Encryption is very important to us.

Has anyone had any experience with using open source ultaVNC and
creating a setup that is user friendly. Obviously there are a million
different services set up a fee, but is it feasible/worth it to try
and create our own, and if we did what it would entail.

Anyone's thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Marc

"Oooh, a sextet of ale"... -Homer Simpson

 

[Guest]

Yes, I do this for most clients.

UltraVNC produce a readymade solution for techsupport, but I didn't find it
too reliable.

I made my own frontend based on Tight VNC. It still isn't 100% reliable
(sigh, is anything on a computer 100% reliable...) however it performs more
reliably than most other solutions, and at least it has far fewer
service-dependencies than the MS applet. I have this packaged into an
installer along with the Mirage framebuffer driver, which makes for a huge
performance boost. With this, it will remote-manage a 1280*1024 screen over
a broadband link at useable speed.

As for ports, the server-initiated link can connect to any port, but (for
reasons to do with the VNC applet itself) the 'listening' client can only
listen on 5500. The best solution to this is to create a portmap on a router
that maps 5500 internal to 80 or whatever external. If you're not using a
router then a portmapper (e.g. Analogx Portmapper) could perform the same
function.

For server maintenance I use Zebedee to encrypt the link, this is
functionally similar to SSH. The wrapper/installer doesn't currently install
this, as I feel standard VNC is adequate for workstations. Since
support-requests are user-initiated and the VNC server is non-resident, I
reckon this is acceptable from a security point of view.

If you want to use my wrapper/installer, I'm sure we could come to an
arrangement.