Before I get into the details of your request, I'll go through and
give you the executive summary.
VNC has a very, very specific task. It gives you a remote access to
the display, mouse, and keyboard of another machine. It is not secure
(data is not encrypted) it is not optimized for performance (use
TightVNC at http://www.tightvnc.com , in my opinion, RealVNC should
never be deployed because TightVNC is so much better and pretty up to
date.), and it offers practically zero management abilities as far as
centralizing user accounts goes.
After answering all the features before, I can add to my summary
above. VNC serves one purpose. That is to transport the remote
display across a network, and map keyboard and mouse inputs back to
that machine. Think of it as a really, really long extension cord for
the Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse. It offers no management
capabilities, no security, and not many features. It's open source,
so its actually designed to be embedded into applications that other
people write that offer all these solutions.
If you're looking for an enterprise-wide remote login solution for
technical support and maintainance, I'd suggest you not consider VNC.
If there are a few machine on your corporate network that you need
remote control of, and are granting access to a limited number of
people, VNC would work.
Secure Remote Control
- Full control of keyboard, mouse and monitor
--VNC does this, and does it well!
- Dynamic compression algorithm adapts to bandwidth
--From http://realvnc.com/howitworks.html#3 : The update protocol is
demand-driven by the client. That is, an update is only sent by the
server in response to an explicit request from the client. This gives
the protocol an adaptive quality. The slower the client and the
network are, the lower the rate of updates becomes. Each update
incorporates all the changes to the 'screen' since the last client
request. With a slow client and/or network, transient states of the
framebuffer are ignored, resulting in reduced network traffic and less
drawing for the client. This also improves the apparent response
speed
- Automatic remote-to-local printing without installing additional
drivers
--Absolutely not!
- Dynamic resizing of desktop
--Nope, whatever the resolution is on the target desktop is the
resolution you'll get with VNC.
- Remote control accessible from any Java-enabled web browser
--Yes! VNC has a small web server with a Java applet that allows you
to take control of the machine. See
http://realvnc.com/javavncviewer.html
- Fully encrypted
--Not at all encrypted, except for the password. You can, however,
create a secure tunnel and transmit over that, but that is a big
hassle, especially in a Windows world. See
http://www.uk.research.att.com/archive/vnc/sshvnc.html
Administration Toolkit
- Background access does not disturb user
--Access completely disturbs user. VNC is not a remote login, it
works at a lower level and hijacks what is actually on the screen, and
emulates the physical keyboard and mouse. When you VNC into a system,
the person at the system will see the cursor moving around the screen.
Good to scare people with!
- Accessible via HTML-formatted pages
--Well, since there is not an Administration toolkit, I'd say it's not
accessible at all. The user of each machine can change the password
to that machine to their heart's content, and nobody can stop them.
- Full Registry editor with ACL support
--Again, the only thing that controls who can access a machine is the
password set on the machine by whoever is sitting at it.
- Emergency and scheduled reboots
--Nope. You can manually do a reboot if you like after VNCing into
the machine, but if you can't access it via VNC, you'll have to get
up, walk over there, and hit the reset button.
- User manager
--Nope. VNC doesn't even have users. Each machine that runs VNC has
only one password.
- View, start, and stop processes and services
--The same way you would do it sitting in front of the machine. Go to
Administrative Tools, Services or open Task Manager
- Time history of CPU and memory usage
--Nope. You could run some other program that logs this information,
and then access it through VNC.
- Virtual memory settings
--Nope. It relies on the OS to take care of that stuff.
- Task scheduling
--Nope. Relies on the OS again.
- Detailed TCP/IP port usage
--Nope. You can specify what port you want VNC to run on. That's
about it.
- Detailed reports on DLL, registry key, and file usage
--You can VNC into the machine and access that with some other tool.
- Fully encrypted
--Except for the initial login password, nothing in VNC is encrypted
unless it's sent over a secure tunnel or VPN.
- Plus much more. Get the full details.
--Not much more with VNC.
File Transfer
- Automatic folder synchronization
-- VNC supports absolutely ZERO file transfer capabilities.
- Delta file transfer
-- VNC supports absolutely ZERO file transfer capabilities.
- Two direction transfer
-- VNC supports absolutely ZERO file transfer capabilities.
- Full encryption
-- VNC supports absolutely ZERO file transfer capabilities, and if it
did, it probably wouldn't encrypt it.
Scripting and Alerts
- Real-time monitoring, logging, and alerting
--Nope. VNC doesn't log or monitor anything.
- Powerful and flexible scripting language
--Nope.
- Alerts can be delivered via email messages
--Nope. No alerts.
- ODBC support allows events to be logged into a database
--Nope. Nothing to log.
Six Levels of Security
- IP filtering
--Nope. Anybody that can ping the machine can access it.
- IP blacklist and lockout
--Nope.
- 128-bit SSL encryption
--Nope. No encryption except for the password.
- Integrated with Windows Authentication
--Nope. Authentication is handled by the one password assigned to the
machine.
- RSA SecurID Authentication (optional)
--Nope. Again, authentication is handled by the one password assigned
to the machine.
- 37 built-in user permission switches
--0 built-in user permission switches.
Access via Wireless PDA
- Special interfaces support handheld and WAP browsers
--VNC does shine here. There are clients for pretty much any device
you can throw at it. They may not have all been written by RealVNC,
but they are out there, and usually work well. I've used it from a
Palm, PocketPC, and seen it on some Cell phones.
- HTML-formatted pages ideal for limited bandwidth situations
--Not having ANY HTML-formatted pages works really fast in limited
bandwidth situations :)
Easy Enterprise Deployment
- Command line installation
--If you count unzipping a folder as an installation.
- Scripted mass-deployment support
--Absolustely not, you're installing this one at a time.
- Background installation
--Nope, Regular Installshield wizard or unzip a zip file.
- Central syslog and database logging for events
--No Logging!
- Network Console Ready
--Possibly, depends what "Network Console Ready" means. You can login
to a machine from elsewhere, and then run VNC on that machine, if that
is what they mean. |
