Cult of the Dead Cow's (cDc's) BOPEEP plugin lets Back Orifice 2000 (BO2K) hijack the remote video display, as Screen A shows, and the console and keyboard. Even though cDc claims that BOPEEP works well, this plugin leaves a lot of room for improvement and, at a minimum, needs some serious video algorithm rewrites.
Using BOPEEP is cumbersome, especially because the local and remote mouse pointers are offset from each other on the screen. The video display doesn't show a complete desktop but instead scrolls over a smaller window of the desktop as you move the mouse.
To use BOPEEP, I had to manually start a VidStream on the remote BO2K server and a Hijack stream for the keyboard and mouse. Each of these streams is a socket listening on a port, waiting for a client connection. The VidStream lets BOPEEP connect and capture the remote computer's video display, and the Hijack stream lets BOPEEP connect and capture the remote computer's keyboard and mouse. (By capture, I mean switch control from the remote machine to my local machine; my mouse movement and keyboard strokes are sent to the remote machine and reflected on the remote desktop as though I were sitting at the remote console.)
BO2K noticeably lacks the ability to configure specific startup operations, such as starting a VidStream and Hijack stream every time the server starts. Without this capability, I had to manually start the required streams each time I rebooted the server. Another annoyance with BOPEEP is that I had to make additional, separate connections for both the video and the mouse and keyboard hijacking. This extra effort meant that whenever I used BOPEEP, I had to manually open three connections to the BO2K server: one for the client and two for BOPEEP. Connecting to the server would be easier if cDc included some program logic in a future release of either BO2K or BOPEEP that improves this particular sequence.
Even with its limitations and bugs, I have to admit that BOPEEP is better than nothing. The remote-control features aren't great, but they work. If BO2K eventually gets a stellar video, keyboard, and mouse hijacking plugin, the product will be more conducive for use in a corporate environment. At a minimum, such a plugin would address BO2K's command functionality shortcomings by providing better access to other GUI-based desktop administration tools, such as the Server Manager, Event Viewer, and User Manager.
