Remote Assistance without invitation?

  • Thread starter Thread starter HaVoK
  • Start date Start date
H

HaVoK

Hey all,

I work in a school environment, and have lots of teachers who can't be
bothered (or taught, more's the pity) how to ask for remote assistance.
I also have students who do their best to thwart our security
policies. In the past, our network was based on NetWare, which despite
all its other shortcomings, allowed us to remote control any user we
wanted, at any time. No requests for permission (well, there was that
option, but we disabled it) or need for the user to send a request for
assistance. Upshot was that if they called with a problem, we could
connect to them almost instantly without needing 5-6 further steps on
both of our computers. For the students, nothing was more gratifying
than finding them breaking some policy or another, seizing control,
freezing the keyboard and mouse, and creating a txt document telling
them to go to the dean's office to get a detention slip.

Is there anyway to make this work in XP Pro? I've seen the options for
using MS Messenger (never going to happen, we have it disabled on every
machine), via email (too many steps), and every other way, but nothing
about an actual SysAdmin's ability to admin his/her own network as s/he
sees fit.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

dk
dkreidler AT regis DASH nyc DOT org
 
XP Pro allows you to use Remote Desktop to access another computer though
you will logoff existing user if they are logged on. You also can do Remote
Assistance without an invitation via a Group Policy setting. Look at the
options under computer configuration/administrative templates/system/remote
assistance. You can run rsop.msc on an XP Pro computer to make sure that
Group Policy setting is being applied to it and I suggest you reboot a
computer within the scope of management of the Group Policy where that
setting is configured after enabling your settings to check for that.

Steve
 
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