Working remote

All people who have done helpdesk work or another support job in the IT area do know the problem by heart: How do you direct users to do exactly what you want them to do? Well - usually you tell them every mouse click. But what if you don’t know the exact word on the buttons or the exact command? Most times the supporter might repeatedly bang his head against the desk and give up.

But as usual, there is that “we will do it” spirit in the IT field, so some bright heads invented remote maintenance software. But according to our experience such software usually just works if you don’t need it or even worse, there’s a firewall or router blocking access to our host preventing our work.

In other words, if you don’t have an admin on the remote site, a common program like VNC just doesn’t work without routing tricks. But what alternatives do we have? The answer’s pretty simple - the remote hands got to run via a server that is reachable by booth hosts: the supporter AND the supported client. Besides that it would be a good thing if the server we’re using as man in the middle would be trustful.

Any ideas?