The Glade 4.0

Does anyone know of any way to remotely log into a PC while giving no notification to the PC user that you're viewing the system? My boss has an old laptop he wants to let his daughter use, but wants to make sure she's safe.

I use LogMeIn as remote control on my computers, but I've never been able to remove the "Your computer is now being controlled by I.P.Add.ress" message that pops up upon remoting in.

Should be something out there, we use Netop Vision here in our testing labs to allow the proctors to monitor the testees activities. It would do what your looking for, but as it's aimed at schools, probably be out of the price range of what your wanting.

Dameware can do this, if you configure the client installation to be silent upon connection.

much love for dameware

Tivoli Remote Control can do the same thing

Safe from what?

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Holy shitsnacks!

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Pedos and ****, I guess. The girl's, like, 12.

Oh, and forgot to mention that he'd be logging in from a Mac.

Is it really that big a deal that the message doesn't pop up? I assume he wants to be able to remote into the laptop (which belongs to him) to check what his daughter's doing?

That seems like a lot of effort to go through to essentially snoop. Why create the illusion of privacy in the first place? Occasionally she gets the, "Daddy just hijacked the computer," message. It's really not that different from your Dad poking his head through the door to make sure your room is clean, and catching you doing something you're not supposed to.

I mean, yeah it sucks to have your parents going through your dresser drawers looking for weed, and stumble across your porn magazines instead, but it was their house.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Apple Remote Desktop works from OS X to PC. Chicken of the VNC is another VNC client for Mac.

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Once, I was a ranger
Then, I was a warlock
And a mage
And a paladin
Now, I seek to be myself

Yeah - I was gonna say VNC.

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The Dude abides.

If this old laptop is running Windows XP or earlier, having more than one graphical login simultaneously violates the EULA anyway (if you care about this sort of thing). Microsoft has all kind of retarded "single user only" rules for their non-server OS editions. Some of these have been lifted a bit in Windows 7 (maybe Vista too?), but I'm guessing that's not the case.

VNC would be an obvious solution for cross-platform remoting as noted above. However, I'm not sure if/how you can go about connecting via VNC to a user's session without it being obvious. I'm not saying it can't be done; I just don't know. I've never deployed VNC for that purpose.

I'm curious why he thinks he actually needs to do remote desktop to the laptop in order to snoop around, though. There are lots of ways to keep tabs on her without the headache of trying to figure that out.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stat -- Vista's the same as 7. It was the addition of switch user that was the implicit permission.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Right, but here's the thing:

Although XP and later all have "fast user switching", you can still only have one active console at a time. User switching does exactly what it says on the can -- it lets you switch users. You still can't have more than one session active simultaneously, in spite of the fact that every NT-based version of Windows has been inherently multi-user at the process level since the very beginning.

In fact, I misspoke entirely earlier. Nothing has changed. If you connect to a Windows 7 computer via RDP, you can log in as a different user, but it forces the console session to suspend. It's just like XP, only you no longer have to force the console session to log out completely. They're still locked out of their session while the RDP session is active, and vice versa. To the best of my understanding, this behavior is intentional, due to the terms of the EULA, which prohibit you from using your multi-user OS as a multi-user OS.

The most retarded thing of all is that Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and (as far as I know) even Enterprise edition all behave this way too. Want to log in quietly as an administrator to install new software, etc. without disturbing your users' work? Oh well! Sucks to be you! (and them!)

Isn't Windows grand?

But anyway, I don't think that's what's FarSky's boss is trying to do. I misunderstood the scenario the first time around. What he wants is a "spycam" view of *her* console session. That can probably be done by VNC. There are quite a few VNC servers and clients for Windows, so you can choose your poison. I've used TightVNC quite a bit, but YMMV.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm partial to UltraVNC. Haven't used it in about six months but it has lots of bells and whistles, and I think there's an option for silent mode. Even if not, the tray icon just subtlely changes colors when someone connects - from like THIS to THIS. There's no announcement or confirmation box (at least there is an option to turn that off, I'm positive of that).

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