davintosh

Ok, here’s a weird remote access tale, that just happens to be true…

Tonight I needed to edit some video on a computer at church — a Mac G5. That particular computer is set up for remote access by way of VNC, but is behind a pretty tightly controlled firewall. The church does have a Windows Small Business Server 2003 with Remote Web Workplace running on it that is accessible through the firewall. The problem is that Remote Web Workplace requires ActiveX to be running on the client computer, so Macs need not apply…

Or can they?

At work I have a Windows XP machine that is set up for outside access via GoToMyPC; GoToMyPC recently released a version that works great with a Mac as a connecting client… So I use my humble G4 PowerBook to open a GoToMyPC session with my work computer, then connect to Remote Web Workplace from there. Once connected I open a session on one of the Remote Workplace computers, fire up VNC, and hit Connect with the address for the G5. Three layers of security, three different ISPs & six passwords later… Can you say “latency”?

That latency is especially evident where trimming the video is concerned. Moving the Quicktime trimming controls with the mouse can only get you so close to where you need to be, so that’s followed by nudging the video with the arrow keys, at a rate of about 50 clicks per second of video. Painfully slow.

I think it might be faster to just drive out there, and save this trick for something for which it’s better suited. For.