TightVNC

My freshman year in college, I bought an IBM desktop for school. The thing is huge...it weighs about 40 pounds. Despite its large size, it has a 13 GB disk and 128 MB of RAM. Pretty pathetic when compared to today's standards but back then, it was top of the line.

The computer has been sitting in my brother's room for the last couple of years but he continuously breaks it by infecting it with tons of spyware and viruses. He states most of them are from porn sites...at least he's honest. So being the big brother that I am, I stole it back from him in hopes that this old beast could have a nice new home to live in and live the rest of its live without suffereing from constant popups about penis enlarging supplements.

After a couple of hours, I had Windows 2000 installed on it along with all of the newest patches from Microsoft. In addition to the OS and related patches, I have an old version of Norton, SpyBot, and other minor applications installed. I still have no idea what I'm going to do with it but I figure it would be nice to have a mini server hooked up to my network.

I definitely didn't want to have a monitor hooked up to it but rather wanted to control it from my laptop. Unfortunately, since it's running Windows 2000 I couldn't set it up as a host for the Remote Desktop Connection that comes with XP so I started off by using NetMeeting. I like NetMeeting when it's used for video conferencing. In college I would video conference with my family in Korea using NetMeeting and the picture and sound quality were pretty good. There was a 2 second delay but when you consider packets going all the way around the world and the fact that it was free, I could deal with a 2 second delay. When it comes to Remote Desktop Sharing, however, NetMeeting is pretty useless.

After searching the web, I found a open source project called TightVNC. It's basically a client server application that lets you see the desktop of a remote machine and control it. It's pretty easy to set up and works like a charm and I'd even prefer it over XP's Remote Desktop Connection. Working at blue, I've come across a couple different open source applications out there and I must admit all of them are pretty impressive. This would definitely be something you should check out if you're an open source advocate.