John:
Heya. Some suggested answers to your questions. First off,
though, my EchoVNC and Echogent's are the same EchoVNC. :)
1. Are there other products in addition to the above products I
need to look at? Any clear leaders? Does the Packet Server really
work? Any serious negatives? (Windows environment)
EchoVNC, CoPilot (which released 2.0 this week) and UltraVNC's
new PCHelpware all use a similar packet-relay approach. There's also
TeamViewer and HelpDeskVNC. None of these IMO (even EchoVNC) are as
sophisticated and as clean as LogMeIn (which owns Hamachi now), which
I consider the leader, though it's not VNC-based.
The biggest negatives are the physical limitations of the
packet relay server itself. Eventually, there's a file descriptor
limit in the server's OS and it won't relay any more connections.
This drawback is more relevant to EchoVNC users, as most of our users
run their own relay server (which we call an echoServer) -- most of
the others run their own relay server that the users simply subscribe
to.
To work around this limitation, LogMeIn and CoPilot (and soon
EchoVNC) try to establish a "direct" peer-to-peer connection (using UDP
tunneling techniques) rather than have the packet relay server relay
*all* data connections. These connections are also lower-latency, which
is the second biggest negative to the packet relay approach.
2. Since I prefer TightVNC (good file transfer), do any of the
solutions support TightVNC client directly? File Transfer too?
Maybe only need the TightVNC (viewer/winvc) on clients, no additional
software, that would be ideal since many of my clients already have the
TightVNC apps.
As UltraVNC supports file/folder-transfer, I know that both
EchoVNC and UltraVNC's would do what you want. CoPilot's 2.0 press
release also indicates it supports file-transfer. LogMeIn Free does
not -- that's when they start asking for money. :) If OSX support is
important, CoPilot is there now, and EchoVNC is in beta.
That's about all I know (not really). I hope it helps!
cheers,
Scott
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