Good day all, it’s the Angry Systems Administrator. Today I”m going to review one of the portable applications I like to use. This tool is called Mremote and is a remote desktop connection tool It’s used by developers and Systems Administrator to manage servers and desktops. Essentially it turns your computer into a thin client.

Now to explain what I mean to those less technical. Windows allows people to connect to a remote computer and see the desktop. For all intents and purposes, you are on a computer with all the tools and programs you need, however they are not on YOUR computer. Microsoft provides a tool called Remote Desktop. It’s rather limited in my opinion.

A fair number of other people agreed with this sentiment and came up with the open source tool called Mremote. This tool allows you to save multiple connections, has tabs so you can be connected to a number of different systems. You can connect with the RDP protocol, VNC, HTTP. HTTPS, ICS or by using an external application. (I’ve done it with Dameware)

Mremote is free, but the developers have stopped work on it. All subsequent versions have been commercial. The last open source version is 1.50 and is several years old. It’s stable but lacking some newer features. Other fans decided to fix this by taking the source code and forking ((Splitting the project)) the application. They have come up with MremoteNG.

I’ve just discovered this and have started looking into it. At first glance it looks like Mremote but isn’t quite a polished. Hopefully, the people working on it will clean up the interface a bit. From what I’ve been able to see, the early versions basically cleaned up bugs in the original source code. They are doing regular releases from what I can see, with the latest version released in July. Both Mremote and MremoteNG come with portable versions, which I prefer. In my other job, I use a vpn connection with Citrix to log into a remote desktop session. I have the portable version on a network drive that allows me to connect with all the servers I maintain.

This brings me to another great thing about both Mremote and MremoteNG. They allow you to connect to the console. For a systems Administrator this is a big thing. When you are on the “Console” it’s as if you were actually at the computer and logging in directly. For most RDP connections this isn’t the case. You are logged in under a “virtual account” and may not have the full access you need. If you disconnect and reconnect, you might not have the desktop you had previously.

Of course, when working on a PC you have one major issue with RDP. If you log in, you lock the desktop console and anyone who is logged in will either be knocked off, (The account logged out) or the desktop will be locked and the user can’t access it without logging back in and knocking you out.

This isn’t an issue if using VNC, Dameware, or one of the other commercial products.

So, I heartily recommend Mremote and it’s cousin, MremoteNG.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~