Quickie Post - Remote Access Apps on the Cheap

There’s always that one time when you’re travelling that you absolutely need access to your home office PC to grab a file, help your wife find a specific photo, or whatever. Thankfully, there are a ton of options out there for remote access - and for you today, I am going to cover three of them.

First, there’s the homebrew method. It’s quick, cheap and pretty effortless, though not as fully featured as the next two i’m going to discuss. For this method, you need a copy of the Hamachi VPN software (free version available here for basic use). You’ll also need a copy of VNC, of which there are about a million varieites. Let’s grab TightVNC for starters, and you can tinker with others later to find what you prefer. Now, this is a quickie post, so I’m not going to walk you through the installs of either app, as both sites have plenty of info on that. But once you have both installed on your home office PC, you’ll need to use Hamachi to create your private network (don’t forget to slap a password on it, and make it something you’ll remember) and configure TightVNC to use a password, also. Be sure you set Hamachi to log in on Windows startup, and set up TightVNC Server to run as a Windows service, so it’s always there for you. Otherwise, no sense in trying to connect remotely to apps that aren’t running when you need ‘em.

Now, set up both apps on the machines you use remotely, connecting to the Hamachi network you created and setting up TightVNC’s client (called “TightVNC viewer”) so it can access the home office machine. Now, head out to the coffee shop with your laptop and connect to your Hamachi network. From there, you should be able to fire up TightVNC Viewer, feed it the IP address of your home machine (shown in the Hamachi client window) and have a nice remote control session. If you have files shared on the home machine, you can access them quickly by going to Start — Run  and typing in \\ipaddress\  (using the address of the home machine in place of “ipaddress”.) This will bring up a Windows explorer window showing the shares available.

If you’d like something a whole lot simpler - there’s LogMeIn, which offers a free version. LogMeIn does one thing, but does it well - remote control.  If you want something that lets you access file shares and do more than just remote control, you’ll need to try something else. But if you just want to jump onto your home PC, move a few files up to an FTP, and be done, this is a great free option. Just head to www.logmein.com and grab a copy of the free version. The install process is cake simple, just remember to put passwords on your installation, and install it on all your machines.  This will give you browser-based remote control of your PC. If you’d like a more “software” styled interface (in case browser-based just bugs you too much), you can try out LogMeIn Ignition, available from the same site. It’s a trial version, but I have to say, it was so handy, I forked over the money for the paid version.

And now, last but not least, is gBridge, which I just heard about yesterday (I forget where, so I’m giving Lifehacker credit, as they have lots of pretty pictures of it up today.) gBridge uses your Gmail credentials as a login to give you access to Google Chat, remote desktop sharing, file sharing/syncing and file backup. It’s not the prettiest interface I’ve ever seen, I told a friend today it reminded me of 1998-era shareware, but it works, and works well. Right now it’s free, but my money’s on them looking for a buyer real soon, as it is a very solid application. You just download an install it on each PC or laptop you’re going to use, and go. As with the other apps, I highly suggest you put a password on the remote access, and disable allowing your Gmail contacts access to your files and folders until you’re used to its somewhat tricky sharing system.  Definitely check out Lifehacker for an overview of all of gBridge’s features.