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From: chapman@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Brent Chapman)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Microstuf Remote
Message-ID: <40@zen.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 30-Aug-86 07:27:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: zen.40
Posted: Sat Aug 30 07:27:00 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 30-Aug-86 19:58:50 EDT
References: <1246@ihlpl.UUCP>
Sender: news@zen.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: chapman@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Brent Chapman)
Distribution: net
Organization: UNIXversity of California at Berkeley
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In article <1246@ihlpl.UUCP> rlneal@ihlpl.UUCP (Neal) writes:
>I am considering the purchase of a Microstuf software
>package called "REMOTE".  It is supposed to allow you
>to use your PC remotely from another PC or a terminal
>just as if you were sitting in front of your PC.
>
>Has anyone out there in netland had any experience
>using "REMOTE"?

We have Remote installed on our AT at work, though we seldom use it.  It
appears to work well enough, at least for stuff that doesn't play funky
games with the hardware.  

There is a "screen mode" that basicly sends
an image of the screen, read directly from memory, instead of duplicating
individual screen accesses.  This will supposedly work with programs that
write directly to video memory, but there is a noticeable overhead.

The program will send codes for various terminals and/or emulators.  I
don't remember if there are provisions for defining new terminals, but
I don't think so.

The system is "password protected", with a "master password", and seperate
individual IDs and passwords for users.  This protection is trivial to break
if you're on the host machine.  I don't remember exactly how I did it (this
was several months ago), but it took me about 10 minutes to find the master
password (which I had forgotten).  Presumeably, it would be just as easy for
a "valid" user logged in remotely to break the master.  I don't have any
knowledge or opinions of its security from external attack.

One cute little gotcha, though, which either isn't mentioned at all in the
docs, or isn't made obvious, is that you can NOT have an ANSI driver
installed if the program is to work.  The best way to deal with Remote
seems to be to make a special boot floppy just for it (this also makes
handling power failures simpler.  Now if only the PC had an auto-reboot
watchdog circuit...  :-)


Hopefully helpfully,

Brent

--

Brent Chapman

chapman@cory.berkeley.edu	or	ucbvax!cory!chapman