Apple is developing a major upgrade to Remote Desktop, the company’s desktop management and screen-sharing software, Think Secret has learned. Sources said Apple Remote Desktop 2 will boast standards-based reporting, task scheduling, VNC support, and other new features.
Apple Developing Remote Desktop 2
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I don’t understand why Apple retails this product. Its a free feature in XP, Remote Desktop software is available free for both OS X and XP, so why sell this product for $300 when you can get it free somewhere else.
AFAIK, the Apple solution is bitmap-based (that’s what I hear, I haven’t used it) and if that’s true, then it is as slow as VNC (XP PRO’s solution is much faster than that, as it is “more native”).
>Its a free feature in XP
Actually, the server & client together only exists on XP PRO. XP Home and Win9x/ME only have the clients.
Major disapointment if this is based on VNC- My experience with VNC is that it’s dog slow, even over a 100 Mbit LAN. Remote X is much faster (over a LAN at least). I don’t know what magic tricks MS is using with there RDP-software but with a ordinary broadband connection (i.e. 512/512) it’s almost like being at the actual machine (take that with a grain of salt though). Unfortunately, performance ain’t that much better over a LAN which is kind of weird.
As I have said in the past, the difference between XP’s solution and VNC is that VNC uses bitmaps, and that’s always slow no matter how much you optimize it. VNC’s targets is multi-platformness more than anything else, so it makes some sense for them to use bitmaps to achieve this. However, if Apple’s solution is mostly destined for Apple machines, they should develop a technology similar to XP’s (a “native” solution rather than based on bitmaps).
Hopefully this version of ARD will know to optimize (“Native solution”) when connected to other Mac clients, and maybe with it’s VNC integration can connect to non-Mac clients [via vnc] ……
I use VNC for monitoring my PC workstations at work and providing hepr to users. I use Apple Remote Desktop for the macs. The soltuion that remote desktop admin provides is far more superior to what RD does on XP AFAIC.
The server (client in mac terms) is a free download for operating systems less than 10.3 — 10.3 provides it for free. The admin software is what costs.
>>However, if Apple’s solution is mostly destined for Apple machines, they should develop a technology similar to XP’s (a “native” solution rather than based on bitmaps).
Eugenia- I’d have to agree, but I have a feeling Apple wants to be able to cross the *nix devide with this. I don’t know the logistics of this but if it were me, I’d build in VNC support but have the Apple-to-Apple default to something more, well for lack of a better word Apple.
All I know is that M$ RD makes my workspace a lot cleaner now that I run my PC headless (of course I don’t use the PC that often
)
It nice to see Apple users get this handy utility too. What I want to know is why did it take Apple this long to offer this? WinXP Pro had this feature for a while. Also SuSE Pro 9.0 has this feature as well which is called Remote Access – Desktop Sharing and Remote Desktop Connection.
Remote Desktop has been around for a while on the Mac. There have also been third party solutions such as Timbuktu.
I would like to remind everyone that Apple Remote Desktop exists now, and is quite fast. Just because they’re adding VNC support in the next version doesn’t mean they’re going to throw performance considerations out the window.
VNC is an open standard, and there are tons of open source clients available. It’s likely that Apple is just adding a VNC module based off of some previous work.
As for MS RDC, I agree it’s great, but it’s far from perfect. How come it’s the same speed over my local network as it is over a broadband connection from wherever? (meaning, surprisingly fast over the net, and surprisingly slow locally) Seems like it should be able to offer better performance locally rather than doing worthless junk like playing sound effects/window animations.
Dark_Night:
That’s actually built into KDE. It uses VNC as the backend.
fraeone:
Where I used to work I would RDP into my desktop from somewhere else on the LAN and I couldn’t ever tell the difference from sitting at my desk. Of course, the offices were only about 20 meters apart, if that, but not on the same switch.
Yeah, notice it says they are adding VNC support, not that they are basing it all on VNC. It sounds like they are just adding a bunch of standards stuff to make the current Mac only appliction more cross platform, and throwing in a few new nifty features to make it worth the upgrade for current users. This doesn’t look like a rewrite.
What I’d like to know is where did the Home-On-The-Go (or whatever it was called) go? It was supposed to be in Panther, they even listed on their site for a while. The idea was that you could sync your home folder to your iPod, and log-in to any OS X machine through the iPod, keeping all your files and settings wherever you go.
Remote Desktop is used every day with my server/clients. It’s far from fast (yet is alot faster, and less buggy than VNC). Hopefully Apple will put remote instruction sets in the next version, it would help a whole lot, speed wise. However, You can do alot with RD that you cannot with others. Such as one click acess to lock the screen, shut down the machine, put it into sleep, transfer files & even install new programs without the user even knowing it’s happing (you can also push the new software to muliple machines at the same time.
One of the places I help admin has a network based almost solely on Terminal Services for Windows, and it works like a charm for what they need. Saves them a bunch of money by being able to use old hardware for clients, etc.. (i’m sure you all know the benifits of TS). They’ve recently been asking me if it’d be possible to set something similar up using an Apple server. From what I’ve seen/heard, Apple Remote Desktop can’t use the multi-user functionality of OSX, but am I wrong? I’d love to be wrong in this case, and give them some type of option when it comes time to upgrade their server. I’d assume that it would also require having all Mac clients too.
XP’s remote desktop is bitmap based too. The only difference with VNC is that they capture GDI calls to only refresh the parts of the screens that were modified.
The best, by far, remote desktop solution I’ve used is NoMachine’s NX which is basicaly X with a cache. Who said X sucks?
Does this allow the remote user to logon to the users machine whilst they are logged on and working? Or is it like Win XP where you cannot logon remotely if someone else is logged on?
I believe that VNC support will be only for connecting from non-Apple computers. That would be better than what they have now, and that’s nothing, of course if you don’t count third party stuff.
I guess if its VNC based win32 (winodws) VNC clients will work.
But VNC is slow. Apple needs to use something more native and thus faster and have a win32 client.
I can remote desktop to my windows servers and XP machines from OS X, but cant go the other way unless I use run a VNC server on OS X (slow)
If Apple could tunnel pdf somehow it would have a nice GUI since the client machine would then have to render it.
btw isnt rdesktop open source?
“VNC support”…where are all of you getting this VNC based idea? They are adding support for VNC.
I don’t understand why Apple retails this product. Its a free feature in XP, Remote Desktop software is available free for both OS X and XP, so why sell this product for $300 when you can get it free somewhere else.
ARD is much more than the ability to control a remote computer via the GUI. It is more akin to Microsoft SMS. In addition to remote control, it allows you to generate reports on hundreds of remote clients at a time that detail every software and hardware installed, it allows you to select hundreds of machines at a time and install software packages on them, it allows your clients to signal that they need “help” and you as an admin at an ARD admin console can assist your users remotely. You can observe multiple users desktop activity at a time like a “security camera”. You can also do things like lock client users screens on demand, log them out, start the screensaver, put clients to sleep, open files remotely for your users if they are logged in etc…
so, as you can see, ARD is mainly aimed at system administrators and lab admins in schools where they need to do much more than just have remote control over client computers. RDC installed with XP pro only allows you to log in and control a single remote machine, it has no useful features for system admins.
One of the places I help admin has a network based almost solely on Terminal Services for Windows, and it works like a charm for what they need. Saves them a bunch of money by being able to use old hardware for clients, etc.. (i’m sure you all know the benifits of TS). They’ve recently been asking me if it’d be possible to set something similar up using an Apple server. From what I’ve seen/heard, Apple Remote Desktop can’t use the multi-user functionality of OSX, but am I wrong? I’d love to be wrong in this case, and give them some type of option when it comes time to upgrade their server. I’d assume that it would also require having all Mac clients too.
I believe netboot is what your looking for.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/netboot.html
Excellent post by Anonymous above about the capabilities of ARD.
To answer some questions in the thread, ARD came out exactly two years ago this month. There have been some updates along the way.
As to whether it can be used on a client that is being used, that is certainly something it could do, but there would be no reason to do that as that would be a mess. What you want to see is a client desktop *not* being used so you can troubleshoot or get reports. The client software allows you to check off things you want to be able to do with the client (or not do). So, there are a variety of ways you can set things up, according to what your intent or goals are for using ARD.
This sounds like a big upgrade – I’m dimly hoping there will be an upgrade discount, but am not holding my breath 🙂
Actually, I think netboot is probably the closest to what you are looking for. The main difference here is that with TS, the processing is done on the server end while with netboot all computing is done using the client computers processor. The user experience is the same, in that when the user logs in they receive their network home directory or “roaming profile”. Netboot probably makes better use of resources in this sense, because since fast client CPUs are really cheap these days you might as well actually run the software on the client rather than the server, even if the system image is essentially locked down and booted from a server.