The Hun said:
1. When I'm sitting at a table with a laptop, with one or more
people
who also have laptops, how do I make the information displayed on my
screen also display on the screens of the other laptops, effectively
mkaing the other laptops act as dumb terminals?
2. Assuming it's possible to have the information on my display
also
display on other laptops, is it also possible for the others to be
able
to take turns at controling the information? The information on the
screen may be a spreadsheet, a text document, or other types of
software.
UltraVNC (
http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/). It's free. However, you
need permission on each host to install the server on the target host
(so you can connect to it from a remote host to see its screen), or
permission on each remote host (so you can install the client there to
connect back to the target's host of whose screen you want to see).
UltraVNC can use an SSL plug-in to secure your traffic between the
remote and server hosts (so no one can sniff out your traffic),
especially important for work if you are going across the Internet and
not using a VPN. Rather than installing and using the UltraVNC client
on the remote host to display the target host's screen, you can also
use their Java plug-in on the remote host to use a web browser there
to connect to the UltraVNC server back on the target host. That means
with the Java plug-in that the remote host can be running any OS
(Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS/X). If you have a firewall on the
target host, you will need to configure it to permit unsolicited
connects from outside to the UltraVNC server's listening port so you
can connect from the remote hosts. If the target host on which the
UltraVNC server is running is also using an NT-based version of
Windows, you can have UltraVNC use those accounts rather than define
separate ones just for UltraVNC. That is, rather than define separate
logins just for UltraVNC (or using just one that you share with others
so everyone knows how to get into the target host), you can have
UltraVNC use the Microsoft logon accounts under Windows NT/2000/XP.
In your case, you would probably install the UltraVNC client on the
other laptops and configure them so they cannot do anything back on
the target host that is running the UltraVNC server; i.e., the other
laptops only *see* what you are doing on your laptop. I'm pretty sure
all the VNC flavors let the remote client run in view-only mode.
However, if you are going to let each remote control the mouse and
keyboard on the target host, all those users will be battling with
each other on controlling those devices on the target host, like
everyone talking at once on a party line.
I've never used Remote Desktop but it is a feature of Windows XP.
The problem with all these solutions is that the screen updates have
to go over the network. It's not too bad when you have a 100Mbps LAN
across which you transfer the incremental screen changes, but over the
Internet on your 6Mbps connection it would be too slow and jerky, and
worse on a slower connection bottleneck between the two hosts.
UltraVNC has a mirror driver that helps speed up the video updates
(don't recall it if helped or not to reduce jerkiness on the remote
host).
The more loaded is the target host that is running the UltraVNC server
(to which you connect from the remote hosts), the jerkier will be the
display seen on the remote hosts. The UltraVNC server process will
compete for resources along with all the other processes on the target
host so it can get choked in sending screen updates to the remote
host. If the target host is heavily loaded (CPU and/or disk activity
is high and remains that way), you will find screen updates at the
remote hosts are exaspertingly jerky. After loading the UltraVNC
server on the target host, you could increase its priority at the
expense of the other jobs (which are probably the more critical jobs
that you really need to run on that host).
