8
votes
Remote Access that's safe and not a scary nightmare
My child (who does not live with me) has a PC. He's pretty good at sorting problems out for himself, but he sometimes needs extra help. We've tried doing this over phone and video calls, and it's an unfun experience for both of us.
Is there a remote access software that would fit our needs? I want to be able to connect to his computer over the Internet and have some level of control when he's logged into his account. I'd need to be able to open files, I wouldn't have to be able to save them. He's using Windows 11. I think he's using the home version. I'm using Windows 10 Pro. We both have reasonably good Internet speed.
TeamViewer is very popular and would be free for your use case: https://www.teamviewer.com/en-us/info/free-for-personal-use/
Thank you (and everyone else) for this suggestion.
Here's some information that might be relevant for people who try to install it and run into weird problems.
This is an https link. My ISP interferes with it! I get a firefox "Secure Connection Failed" "An error occurred during a connection to www.teamviewer.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR" error message.
Changing it to http gives me this page:
It's easy enough to turn off - there's a button I can click on my ISP account website.
This makes sense. Scammers do often use teamviewer as a tool to gain access to people's computers. I know a lot of people suggest using it. But just go do a quick google search for "teamviewer hacked". I'm not telling you not to use it. But I would consider alternatives. (See my other comment in this thread). Good luck!
I use remotedesktop.google.com and it works just fine.
if you're comfortable tinkering with your network settings, the most secure option would be to set up a WireGuard VPN tunnel between your two computers. this might require setting up port forwarding on one or both routers.
and then you can use normal Windows Remote Desktop or TightVNC or whatever else you would use if they were on the same LAN.
this is the setup I run for my parents' house, except the WireGuard tunnel is directly between the two routers.
This is the method I'd recommend as well. I run an OpenVPN server from my pfSense and it's the only open port I need on my firewall for local resources (unless I'm running a game server for some friends).
Security-wise, it's about as good as it gets. It can be configured to require both a password and a certificate from clients. While there are port scanners that will look for it, they are not nearly as frequent as scans for RDP, and known attacks against a single VPN are much easier to manage than those against a given remote desktop service.
Network-wise, it can be configured to integrate or isolate within the local network. Although, this would depend on the network. The pfSense integration of OpenVPN gives me just as much control over it as it does any other subnet. Mileage would vary with other setups, and network segmentation may be difficult to pull off with given network hardware. But this isn't necessary for just getting a secure tunnel for remote desktop, it's more of a nice feature if you can arrange it because it allows you to additionally limit access if needed.
Microsoft has a remote assist function built right into the OS but TBH I've never successfully gotten it to run.
At work we use Zoho Assist, which is cross-platform and generally speaking it's the easiest remote desktop software I've seen; you send them a link and it will give them a download link for the software that is customized to work for your session. You can use an app or you can access it through the web. I think they have a free tier as well, so in theory it won't cost you anything.
AnyDesk works fairly well, doesn't require an account (unlike recent TeamViewer versions), has broad OS support and is no more of a security problem than TeamViewer. You can and should run it as a user, without even installing it, and shut it down when not in use. Use secure passwords.
TeamViewer has been involved in a couple of spots of controversy over the years, notably outright denial of responsability when users were compromised a few years ago.
If you end up having trouble with TeamViewer (or want to connect from macOS/Linux/iPhone), I recommend nomachine.com. I've heard very great things about NoMachine and I used it myself to connect a mac/linux computer to a Windows (I thought it worked decent though I don't have other VNCs to compare).
NoMachine is 100% free but you may need the enterprise version to get around NAT and firewalls or make setup easier: https://www.nomachine.com/enterprise-desktop-family. Though, I think the free version will be good enough and I'm honestly not sure what enterprise gets you at this point. The main challenge (which may also apply to TeamViewer or any other VNC) is getting behind the NAT and firewall. NoMachine will try to configure your son's computer to accept incoming connections, but some computers / routers have extra security which you will need to research and manually disable.
You should have QuickAssist built in to both of your computers and is VERY simple to use. I think you'll have to sign into it with a Microsoft account to get it going. I used to use teamviewer a lot and it always worked fairly well. I recently discovered that they had some sort of hack/data breach that they tried to sweep under the rug or hide from the general public and that didn't sit well with me. Another one that you can look into is AnyDesk. When you first launch the exe it will kind of ask you to install but you can use the program just like that without actually installing anything. Good luck!
I'll parrot Teamviewer as well for personal use. Free and works perfectly fine for that use case.
I've been using Jump Desktop for a couple years now. Another free one, unless you're using a Mac/iOS.
And Google Remote Desktop has worked fine for me in the past in a pinch.
Another vote for TeamViewer. It worked well for me for many years back when I was still on Windows, dating back to well over a decade now, so their longevity is also encouraging.
Now I just use ssh on Linux, which is probably too techie for "regular" users.