My father-in-law's computer (an iMac circa 2008 or thereabouts), running OS X 10.6.something, is having troubles. Apparently one of their houseguests installed some kind of antivirus thing on it and that's just making a mess out of things.

I've offered to help. Of course, that computer is in Virginia and I'm in Texas, and we're not planning a trip there any time soon. That means I need to use remote desktop to get there. The challenge, of course, is walking him through the setup, which isn't particularly friendly to non-technical users.

On a relevant Metafilter thread, there seem to be several recommendations for TeamViewer. Anybody here have experience doing this sort of thing? My #1 concern is foolproof setup when I'm not there to hold their hands.

I mentioned Chrome Remote Desktop in a recent thread. I used it to fix my mom's computer this morning. She just had to launch chrome and read a 12-digit number to me.

TeamViewer also works, but once you disconnect it will throw an ad up on your father-in-law's machine and then another dialog box telling you TeamViewer (free) is for non-commercial use only. It's a pain in the ass that way.

I've used TeamViewer, LogMeIn, and GoToAssist (which I use for my clients). Clearly the best of the bunch is GoToAssist, but that is not free.

TeamViewer is annoying for the reasons Rob said.

Frankly, if your father-in-law is comfortable with it, I strongly recommend a one-time process of setting up LogMeIn. Then you can log in at any time and they don't need any interaction whatsoever. All these other remote desktop tools* require varying amounts of work on the other end to get the two people connected. Sometimes this process can make you want to rip your hair out. For example, the address I have to send clients to is "fast support dot com," which I always follow with "fast as in quick or speedy." Every single time my clients don't understand what comes before "support." Ugh.

But enough about me. I strongly recommend LogMeIn. I use it on the computers of my wife, mother, mother-in-law, aunt and uncle, etc. It's free with minimal annoyances.


*I have not tried Chrome Remote Desktop. Very interesting, I might need to look into that...

Chrome Remote Desktop does look attractive. It's a multi-step process to install, including downloading and installing a Mac-native "Desktop Host" program (which otherwise seems connected to Google's automatic update service, so that's good).

It seems they're pretty smart about security. To connect to your own personal computer, remotely, you need to be logged into Google (which for me requires two-factor auth) plus you also need to know a 6+ digit PIN. I'm modestly concerned this pushes things beyond being usable for many people, but it would certainly do the job for me. Normally, I use VNC tunneled through SSH for this sort of thing, but it's a pain. For example, I've got SSH pinned through my home router to exactly one of my computers at home, so I don't have an easy way to connect to anything else there without having to scratch my head about setting up a multi-hop SSH tunnel or something.

Fun thought: I normally put my MacPro to sleep when I'm not using it, since it consumes a non-trivial amount of power. I have my older MacBook Air (circa 2008), which I replaced with the newer generation, sitting around idle 24/7, acting as a low-power print server, but otherwise hiding behind my firewall. With this Chrome Remote Desktop thing, I could remote-connect to that MacBook Air, and then kick my MacPro via Wake-on-LAN, which I could then get to via SSH, etc. This is intriguing.

For the "let somebody remotely help you" functionality, the user at the computer-in-need-of-help presses a "share" button which then generates a random 12-digit PIN. My father-in-law would then presumably read this to me over the phone. Curiously, this appears to be the only thing you need to know to connect to somebody's computer. All the rendez-vous mechanics presumably use Google as a coordination point, avoiding the need to monkey around with firewall configurations and the like.

It appears that this 12-digit PIN is only active for a limited lifetime, and only one machine is allowed in as a remote administrator at a time. This presumably means a very small number of these PINs are active at any given time and it would be hard to make random guesses and find yourself administering a mystery computer, somewhere out there.

I'm going to assume that Google's internal people have audited this from a security perspective, but I wouldn't put it past them to screw something up. I need to run this with WireShark in the background to see if any interesting cleartext flies by. Hmm.

You only need to install the host program if you want your computer accessible when Chrome isn't running.

My father-in-law and I just walked through the process of installing Chrome, then installing Chrome Remote Desktop. All said and done, he filled three pages of paper with 29 individual steps. (And that's without installing the Desktop Host program.) Assuming he can walk his way through those 29 steps, then it will be a piece of cake for me to do the rest of the tech support that his machine needs.

Sigh.

Ah! He's a note taker. I encounter so many of those. I love when they write down the steps that I assure them they'll never need to use. "No, next time you won't have to click 'Don't show me this again.'"

In the office we make a relatively extensive use of Teamviewer to support a remote site. So far it's been very effective and reliable.

I thought I'd mention that if I recall correctly Teamviewer Host, that is the server-only version you'd need to install in your father-in-law PC, should not show popup ads. But I may be wrong here, as we've been using the Licensed version for two years now.