IT Support People - how do you....

feenster99

feenster99

feenster99

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West Yorks, UK
Hi all,
I guess there are quite a lot of people here that provide IT support in various guises. I am partly involved in that area where I work, and want to try and improve how we do things.

A lot of our calls are for basic finger trouble, which can be sorted over remote assistance. So what I want to know is, what software do you use that allows you direct access onto every PC on a client's network? We use Remote Assistance in Windows sometimes but it is not ideal.

Also, what software can you recommend for doing remote audits of clients PC's and networks (seeing what hardware is running, what spec each PC is etc)?

Any help greatly appreciated....

Matt
 
I'm currently working in a Novell environment. Using Novell 6.5. That does all the auditing for us and reports back using console one when needed. We can remotly connect to the machines too with this utility. Novell 6.5 is good but very hard to get used too.
 
for remote access most of our customers use either VNC, RDC or ssh depending on OS, VNC is very nice running system, might be worth looking into
 
We use Dameware for remote access...Getting a little old now, but works really well.

SMS for inventory and Auditing, other than that i have used GFI languard...

Hope that helps!
 
Memphis said:
The solution we use, while certainly not the best, is pretty simple: VNC Server on client machines.
Click to expand...

Memphis is right, VNC is the way to go if your supporting over internal networks. I wouldn't be quite as happy supporting machines over the Internet with VNC, as it does not encrypt traffic, unless you already have site to site VPN's in place.

On a side note, can anyone remember the version of VNC that was supposed to have traffic encryption as a option?
 
Memphis said:
The solution we use, while certainly not the best, is pretty simple: VNC Server on client machines.
Click to expand...

Same here, but want to go try something else, like RDP as when you VNC into another computer from VNC it doesnt work so well (like the screen not properly updating)
 
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feenster99 said:
Isn't it a bit of a bind installing VNC server on every machine? Plus, what happens if the IP address floats for the PC?

Matt
Click to expand...

Have it installed automatically at build-time as part of the image/ an additional application with a silent installer. Also for various reasons which I shouldnt need to explain in a thread intended for a techie audience I would wholeheartedly recommend static DHCP leases in your internal network where possible :)

At my place of work we use a combination of AD/Group Policy/SMS, in-house written tools and scripts. For a small affiliated institute I did consider WPKG as an alternative method to pushing/pulling applications post-install but this is still in the testing stage and Im also looking at another in-house solution :)
 
don't connect to machines by IP but machines names which we have a note of.

also various software is able to tell me what users ip address is if necessary, use Citrix Management console a lot aswell.
 
We have site to site VPNs with most of our clients (over 100). We have some in house software to remote admin. It uses VNC as its basis, but has extra funtions built on top
 
I use Goverlan for PC access, it installs itself.
just click a PC and you're looking at the desktop in 3 seconds.

It can do loads of clever scripting stuff too, which I haven't got around to playing with


Audit stuff is done with a couple of scripts, mostly knocked up when I'm looking for something in particular.
I use some scripts for scanning for new programs, processes, currently running apps, AV status, known spyware etc. - they send me an email if anything new pops up.

If the site was bigger than say 300 PC's, I'd probably buy the SMS tool.

If you look at automating as much as possible, it gives you more time to spend with users, and building their confidence on using PC's. They are then more inclined to figure problems out by themselves rather than ringing IT

.
 
We use Ultra VNC viewer.. set it to 256 medium res and it's good enough to do most support calls I find.


And its free I think? :)
 
Thanks for all the tips. Goverlan looks like it deserves more research from my part.

I am particularly interested by the VPN + VNC Server option (mainly due to the cost!). What VNC server software do you recommend? A small memory footprint is of course very important. Also, do you just setup the VPN in Windows Network Connections, or use some other software?

And in terms of scripts for auditing, where do you source these? I really only want to find out the spec of the PC (CPU, RAM, Hard drives, Network drives etc) and the network info (IP Address, computer name, DNS addresses etc).

Sorry for all the questions, but this looks like it could be quite a useful thread for others to look at.

Cheers,
Matt
 
networkstreaming pro for remote access here, don't think it's been mentioned so far. Pretty competant for all aspects that we use it for, remote server admin, client desktop picnic work, can force a session internally etc etc.

Edit - for simple auditing like that would good old AIDA32 not still do the job - it's feeware now iirc.
 
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