Product Reviews

Remote Control via Browser

RemotelyAnywhere controls Windows NT and Windows 2000 via HTTP.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 04/01/2000

RemotelyAnywhere, produced in Hungary by 3AM Labs and distributed in the United States by Binary Research, offers a truly amazing level of control over Windows NT and Windows 2000 computers. It does everything you might ask for in a remote management package with a disk footprint of less than 1.5 MB on the server. Even better, the client footprint is effectively zero, since all RemotelyAnywhere operations are performed in your Web browser, using secure authentication and SSL to protect the connection.

RemotelyAnywhere interacts with the operating system at a very low level. You can check on the performance of the remote server, control devices, services, drivers, and tasks, manage files, users, and registry keys, and much more. RemotelyAnywhere can retrieve the contents of the event log, reboot the server or just the RemotelyAnywhere service, and adjust process priorities.

For full control of the remote computer, you have two options, each implemented as an applet within your browser. First, you can open a telnet window, giving you command prompt access to the remote machine. If that's not enough, you can open a full graphical remote control window and work with the server via the keyboard and mouse. In this mode, RemotelyAnywhere provides special interface controls for keystrokes such as Ctrl-Alt-Del and Alt-Tab that can't be easily typed at the client computer.

RemotelyAnywhere was clearly designed with attention to security. In addition to providing their own secure clients and supporting such technologies as SSL and delegation, their help screens give clear instructions on setting up SSL to handle data transfers.

All in all, I'm very impressed with this package. It's small, fast, full-featured, and secure. Definitely worth considering for any solution that requires controlling Windows NT or Windows 2000 over the Internet.