Remotely controlling another Mac...please help!

[evoluzione]

a little background first...

My Father back in England just got a new iMac (which i'm pleased about as last time i was back home he had a PC. His office was kitted out with Macs back in the days of the Quadras though.). Now, he is pretty illiterate when it comes to computers, he's only just started checking his own email...

also, i want to buy my Mother (different location to my father btw) an iBook (when the new intel ones come out) and she hasn't used a Mac since she had one at work back in the 80s.



now, i would like to be able to access their computers from this side of the Atlantic, as theyll both have problems at one time or another, guaranteed. rather than talk them through any problems over the phone, i want to just log in and take care of any problems. is Apple's Remote Desktop good for this? or what about TimBukTu?

am i going to run into any problems seeing as they'll have routers attached to their cable/dsl internet connections? i'll still be able to access the machines even though they'll have a 192.168.1.x ip address right?


i've a feeling ARD is the way to go and will do what i need, but i'm not sure, so if anyone can answer my questions, that'd be great! thank you!

 

[LimeiBook86]

ARD would work fine, but so will VNC. Either way you will still have to configure the Macs you want to connect to. ARD makes this easy but, if you go the free route such as VNC you'll need to configure things a bit more. I believe either way you go you'll have to open ports on a router for port forwarding.

I haven't played with ARD much since the only version I had was a try-out of 1.0, although I would imagine Apple's route would be the most simple. It shouldn't be that hard but, I would think either you or another tech savvy user would have to setup the Macs you want to control remotely. I can't even imagine trying to explain to my parents how to forward a port on a router for the IP of the computer. Good luck!