Must-Have Remote Administration Tools

Windows' native management tools have improved over the years, letting administrators control most network services from their workstation. Even administrators who work with Windows NT, which lacks Windows 2000's all-in-one Microsoft Management Console (MMC), can manage remote DNS, DHCP, WINS, and other services from their desktops. Yet despite Microsoft's improvements, you might still need to perform some tasks (e.g., hotfix installation, server restarts, file management) from the server console.

That's where remote control tools come in. Remote control tools are invaluable for managing the servers in your company's branch offices and for responding to late-night server problems from the comfort of your home office. In today's atmosphere of heightened security, remote control tools can also let your servers stay safely locked in a data center while you perform maintenance and management tasks from your desk.

Remote Control vs. Remote Administration
Remote control tools fall into the larger category of remote administration tools. Remote administration tools, as the name implies, let you perform administrative tasks on remote servers. For example, you can use the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit's Shutdown utility (shutdown.exe) to shut down and restart network servers and the rkill.exe utility to terminate processes that are running on a remote server. Remote control tools give you control of a server's desktop across the network to let you perform remote administration tasks. Instead of running commands on your workstation that affect the server, you run commands on the server itself, even though you might be miles away from the server's keyboard and monitor.

Several useful remote control tools—many of which are free or inexpensive—are available that let you perform common or crucial server-administration tasks without leaving your seat. I divide these tools into two subcategories:

• graphical remote control tools, such as Win2K Server Terminal Services and Virtual Network Computing (VNC), which bring a remote server's desktop to your local computer
• command-line remote control tools, such as Remote Command, Telnet, Remote Shell, and Remote Console, which let you execute text-based commands on a remote server

Terminal Services
Win2K Server included Microsoft's first built-in remote control technology, Terminal Services. Previously, Terminal Services was available only in a special edition of NT called NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (WTS). Although Microsoft intended Terminal Services primarily as an application server technology (like the Citrix WinFrame product from which it's descended), Terminal Services also offers a remote administration mode that lets up to two administrators simultaneously control a server's console across a network connection.

Win2K Server doesn't install Terminal Services by default, although you can install and use the service in remote administration mode as part of your basic product license. (Windows .NET Server—formerly code-named Whistler—makes remote administration mode a default installation component.) Since Win2K's introduction, I've recommended that administrators install Terminal Services in remote administration mode on every Win2K Server machine they deploy unless they're using VNC, which I discuss later. Installing Terminal Services is easy. Just open the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet, then click Add/Remove Windows Components. Select the Terminal Services check box, then click Next. When the Windows Components Wizard asks which Terminal Services mode you want to use, select the Remote administration mode option.

After you've used Terminal Services, it's hard not to love it. The Terminal Services client lets you launch multiple windows to remotely administer several servers at once. You can run the Terminal Services client software on most versions of Windows, including NT 3.51 and Windows 95. Third-party vendors (e.g., Citrix) provide client software for non-Windows platforms. You can also run the client full screen, which makes your desktop computer seem to be the server's console. For more information about Terminal Services, see "Related Reading."

Virtual Network Computing
VNC is one of the quiet hits of the systems administrator world: Either you know about it and love it, or you've never heard of it and don't know what all the fuss is about. In a nutshell, VNC is a cross-platform remote administration tool that brings a server's desktop display to your workstation, no matter which OS the server is running. Figure 1 shows VNC connected to a remote Win2K Server machine.

AT&T Laboratories Cambridge cre-ated VNC, and the tool is free under GNU General Public License. (For information about the GNU General Public License, go to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.) You can download VNC from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/index.html. Documentation, source code, and other information are also available at that site. When you download and unzip the distribution file, you'll find subfolders for

• the VNC viewer—one executable that's less than 175KB in size
• the VNC server—a complete setup package

Launching the viewer is easy: Just double-click it and type the name of the server to which you want to connect. If the remote server is already running the VNC server software, you'll be remotely controlling it in a couple of seconds.

Installing the VNC server is only slightly more complicated. Double-click setup.exe and follow the installation wizard's prompts to install both the server and the viewer. At this point, you can use the server only in interactive mode, which means you have to launch it manually. Having to manually launch the tool isn't desirable for remote server administration: You really want the VNC server to run automatically. Fortunately, clicking an icon in VNC's Start Menu folder installs VNC for Windows (WinVNC) as a service configured to run under the Win2K or NT 4.0 LocalSystem account and start automatically when the server starts. (Automatic starting is a function of the OS and doesn't work on every system; for example, the functionality isn't available on Macintosh.) Restart your server or, if you're using the service for the first time, start the service manually; VNC will prompt you to set its session password and other configuration settings, as Figure 2, page 30, shows.