Remote Access

OK, I wasn't too sure where to post this, and in my mind this seemed the most appropriate. I have a SmaugFUSS mud running on one of the machines at my home. My friend lives across town and is working on the mud with me. At this time, I'm the only one who can do any sort of offline tasks on the mud. Does anyone know of a good remote access program or something similar to that, where he would be able to access the files on my computer? I'm running a win98 system and he's running winXP. Also, his computer has problems accessing FPT sites, so thats not really an option unless I figure out how to fix that.

Windows 98 does not have any safe remote access as far as I know. Windows XP has this "remote desktop" sort of thing, but I would not trust it.

If your friend can't access FTP sites he may have a firewall issue. Has he tried using passive mode (PASV) FTP?

The keyword in Ksilyan's reply is "safe" but depending on how worried you are about it, I am pretty certain that there are ways. ;)

For one thing, I recall years ago there was some sort of telnet offering for Windows, maybe on the developer CDs. A keyword to search for would be "telnet" and "telnetd", the latter being the daemon program that runs on the target machine to accept incoming commands. Of course, such a thing could be abused if not properly secured.

Try a site like TuCows and browse for things like that, or "remote control".

The other alternative is Linux or similar. You say it is running on "one of" your machines. Perhaps convert that one to Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD. Then you can readily access it remotely (preferably using SSH - secure shell).

Well, there is something called BackOffice or BackOrifice that accomplishes this but personally I would [i][b]strongly[/b][/i] recommand against using it.

What kind of offline tasks are you speaking of? Perhaps there are other solutions that aren't as risky as basically opening your computer to the world. :)

Oh i did see somewhere a snippet that gives shell type access from within the game itself, it might have been on samsons site but dont quote me on that but i do remember it posed a few risks security wise.

You could use something like PC Anywhere, or mayby even Hotline, which is a sever and client setup that gives chat and ftp type capabilities on a port that you specify.

There are so many remote access products available readily in the market but when it comes to remote access, security is the most important aspect. So I would suggest RemotePC as they have high encryptions enforced.

http://www.remotepc.com

I'd strongly suggest not using this one as well since it's a trojan :P

Not sure about BackOffice though as I never trusted Win98 enough to allow incoming connections of any kind under most conditions. Even for IM file transfers.

This was covered recently here:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=6134

This discusses using ssh/sshd for remote access to a Windows PC.