reigning with dogs

By Paul Murphy, author of The Unix Guide to Defenestration

If you've convinced your bosses that administering Unix from Windows telnet is unconfortably like trying to use a team of housecats to win Alaska's Iditarod, you may have ended up with two machines on your desk - one to talk to Unix and a Windows machine to partipate in office reporting and scheduling.

That's a pain you can remove using the free VNC toolset. Originally from AT&T's UK research group ( http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/index.html ) the free version is insecure, but the shareware version from http://www.tightvnc.com/ fixes that.

You get Windows access on Unix by putting the VNC server on a PC somewhere on your network (an emulated PC under Windows 2000 Server works well - as does a real PC under your desk) and adding the client to your Unix machine.

With tightvnc you can do stuff like run your office Windows services on your home SPARC or Linux box - or accessing your home machine from the office if your ISP permits that. In either direction, it's pretty cool and can really help unclutter both your desk and your mind.