The Back-story
Most young people who are tech savvy are always known in their families as “the computer whiz”. If you’re lucky, your entire family are computer whizzes, but even then there are levels of wizardry.
When it comes to my family and friends I love to help out or impart my technical knowledge whenever I can. I am always willing to lend a helping hand, but sometimes it can be a grand pain in the butt to help someone with a computer problem - especially when they live far away and you have to deal with Windows.
A while back - I found myself in one of these situations. My grandfather - who is pretty computer savvy for the most part (he owned an Apple IIe which I would play Frogger on back in the day) has become increasingly frustrated with computers. Part of his problem, as I’ve noticed watching him operating the computer is physical. His typing skills had always been excellent, but at 83 years of age, his dexterity is just not what it used to be. I also noticed that when he clicked the two button mouse, he would inadvertently click both buttons, again because his fine motor skills had been inhibited. This prompted me to get him a trackball mouse, which is a much more appropriate input device for his situation.
Still, he would often call me with user experience problems, most often having to do with Microsoft Outlook. His life-line nowadays to a lifetimes worth of friends is predominately email. When email is not working it is the single most important thing to get fixed right away and I have become the go-to person for my grandfather with all of his tech support problems.
It is a role I cherish - not only because I get quality time conversing with my grandfather on a regular basis, but because he is always very appreciative that I’ve fixed his problem, or eased his worries (he is always afraid hackers are getting at his personal financial records).
But life wasn’t always so peachy until I came up with an elegant solution. Often times I’d spend upwards of an hour to figure out what he “saw” and asking him to describe intimately the details of his actions to try to diagnose a problem he was having. Increasingly it became a frustration because neither he nor I felt we were making any progress. He felt upset and frustrated. He felt like a burden. He was not a burden at all, but the hearsay tech support had to stop.
My problem wasn’t that I didn’t know how to setup VNC or log in remotely to my grandfathers computer - I attempted to do that last time I was at his house (about 1.5 hours away). However, they have 1 DSL line and no good way to test what I had setup from the outside until it was too late.
The Nuts and Bolts
One Sunday I decided not to neglect my problem any longer. I administer various dedicated servers remotely 9-5 all the time, why shouldn’t I come up with a similar solution to help my grandfather?
The Problem
- He’s far away, I want to setup the entire solution remotely - but he’s behind a firewall and I have no way of getting to his desktop to configure his computer. Or so I thought.
- He is not computer savvy. As I believe most people in a similar situation as I was in, the person who needs help doesn’t have the ability to set it up themselves with instruction only, I had to do it for him.
- Time. I wanted something I could jump on - fix and jump off. Sometimes I get a call M-F during the day and I need to fix it and then get back to business, luckily I’ve worked at companies that give me the flexibility I need when it comes to this.
The Solution
I needed access to his desktop with minimal instruction. Thankfully there exists a solution that will let me do that without a lot of hassle.
Copilot from Fog Creek Software does exactly what I needed. This is a paid service - but is only necessary to give me access for the initial setup, get the cheapest package.
Once you’ve gained access, use Hamachi (free) to create a VPN connection to circumvent firewall restrictions. Don’t forget to use a secure password when setting up your hamachi network of which you and your family member(s) will be members.
Refer to my del.icio.us hamachi bookmarks for some good resources.
Now that Hamachi is running on their system and is on your network, you can access the computer anytime - all that is left is setting up VNC access. VNC essentially does the job that Copilot did for us initially - it’s just free.
I recommend Real VNC (also free). It bundles the server and the client together. Setup the server on the remote computer (password protect it for peace of mind) and connect to the computer locally using the Real VNC Viewer client.
If anyone finds this article useful - I’d love to hear about it! Comments welcome.
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