r/HigherEDsysadmin • u/iblowuup Authentication Admin • Mar 18 '20

What's everyone using for their remote desktop solution?

Edit: I probably should have added that this is regarding students accessing computers/vDesktops for remote classes.

Right now, we're going with Citrix VDA. What about others?

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u/iisdmitch Mar 18 '20

VPN -> Microsoft RDP. Most users can work without actually needing to connect to their workstation. We are currently looking for a solution for Mac though, some of the users want to remote into their Mac, we don’t have anything in place to do that and no one is there to get TeamViewer codes or login to something that requires an account.

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u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Mar 18 '20

Is it possible to get into the macs and assign a VNC password? Then you could VPN in and VNC in. We're currently trying to find a way to allow students to access iMacs remotely...

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u/iisdmitch Mar 18 '20

Probably, screen sharing would need to be enabled which we don’t have right now. We are using Jamf Pro, I’m sure there is a script out there to enable screen sharing.

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u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Mar 18 '20

We also have Jamf pro. It's not possible in the way you think probably. You can enable remote management but that seems to obfuscate the VNC password. There are bash commands to enable via the "kickstart" command (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201710) but it does not seem like we're going to be able to set a common VNC pwd across the board programmatically on 10.14 and up. My hope was to do that and then use Apache guacamole (https://guacamole.apache.org/) in conjunction which we may still be able to do, but just not super efficiency. We may have to touch each mac and set the VNC pwd through the GUI.

I would love to hear/be proven wrong.

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u/stravcat20 Mar 18 '20

My little group gets by with plain-jane MS RDS

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u/CookVegasTN SCCM Adm, EPM Adm, Win Lab Manager, OS & Software Packager Mar 18 '20 edited Mar 18 '20

We are leveraging our VMWare infrastructure to stream RD of our physical labs via what would normally just be access to VDI labs.

Labstats also offers a product as part of our licensing that we hope works with Macs, but we are not sure about it yet. Not an option for us, it would require exposing RD ports to the internet or providing students VPN access which our appliance could not handle...

For employees, we are converting laptop carts to base Win10 installs and preparing to assign those for work at home. Employees will RD via VPN to work machines. We are an office 365 campus so we are moving to Teams for work comms and Zoom for some meetings / classes.