Remote connect to your Mac, what do you use?

[spotter]

I'm receiving requests that users are wanting the ability to remote connect to their work Mac from the seat of their home (personal) Mac. We do have a Citrix portal and we currently allow Window users this ability so of course Mac users want the same ability. I have been able to make this work utilizing VNC however our Security dept. doesn't like it.

Is anyone in the NATION providing this functionality to their users? and if so how are you doing it?

Thanks again NATION!!!

[chris_kemp]

Do your users have VPN access to the network? I connect to our VPN and then just use VNC myself.

[mm2270]

Are we talking while on VPN? If so, can't you set up and let them use the ScreenSharing app to remotely connect and control their Macs?

[FritzsCorner]

I would be very interested to see what people are doing for this as well. In our case it would be a way to access a corporate Mac located in the office from a personal device (BYOD). In the windows space we are running Citrix XenDesktop with Remote PC access. This allows a user to login to our Netscaler Gateway from outside the corporate network and securely access their Windows PC or Windows VDI on our corporate network from their personal device via Citrix Receiver.

I can't think of any enterprise options to accomplish the same thing for the Mac. Our associates are not allowed to run our Corporate VPN connection from their own Mac so that is out of the question. The way I do this now is I log into my Windows box and then VNC to my mac from there but that is far from ideal and very slow.

I know Citrix demo'ed something just like this for the Mac at their Synergy conference in 2011 but I don't think it has gone anywhere. Brian Madden Live Blogged the event here:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2011/05/25/citrix-synergy-2011-san-francisco-op...

I can't find the video that was posted for this but I did see it at one time.

Aaron

[#5]

You might want to check out LogMeIn Pro: https://secure.logmein.com/products/pro/

We use TeamViewer for remote support, though it wouldn't be too difficult to deploy it in the manner you describe.

[spotter]

We have the same policy as FritzCorner mentioned

Our associates are not allowed to run our Corporate VPN connection from their own Mac so that is out of the question.

[scottb]

They don't let you run the corp VPN from a personal Mac/PC but they let people connect to them remotely? Seems like an odd combo of policy/lack of policy...
So you're basically wanting to bypass their security rules? Not being a nanny, trying to figure out what the ground rules are...

[jarradyuhas]

Im guessing its like our place. If you connect to the network, you need to be accessing it from a corporate device with an approved AV. Personal devices can use Citrix XenDesktop and corporate macs can use VPN for their non-windows based resources.

[scottb]

We have Pulse VPN for our Macs (and PC's). The host checker will make sure there is an appropriate AV on the machine. Seems odd to be able to connect to a company resource the through the alleyway. Using a personal Mac to connect to a work Mac without corp standards using one of those programs mentioned above seems like a bad idea - from a support standpoint. Is this something that the company is OK with? If so, you're good I guess. If not, don't do it. That would be my recommendation. Someone will be the scapegoat if data is compromised, etc. and it always rolls downhill.

[bentoms]

You could use the following, self host the solution, give the users "technician access" via their credentials (AD or otherwise), & setup a persistent connection on their work mac with a unique password.

http://simple-help.com

[tsuter]

I use VNC over SSH with port forwarding which was pretty much the only method our ITSEC guys approved. Things like TeamViewer were big no-no's here. It's not in widespread use outside of the admins though and would be painful trying to explain to clients how it works.