Apple Remote Desktop version 2 sucks

[ssevenup]

I have been listening to co-workers telling me how marvelous ARD is. I finally had the chance to try it when we got free copies at WWDC. I am wondering if anyone else finds similar problems/limitations…

1- Every time I run ARD it screws up my mouse cursor tracking so badly I have to reboot my Powerbook when I’m done. The cursor lags and then jumps unexpectedly.

2- Every Jaguar system I install ARD 2 client onto will have the menu items in the upper right of the screen jumping around randomly and some disappear altogether. Adding or removing menu items in the Prefs does not help.

3- Many of the Jaguar systems running ARD 2 client become unstable and the Finder will often go out to lunch with the spinner of death.

4- Installing or activating the client does not open the port in the firewall for you.

5- In the reports stuff like “Free Disk Space” will sort alpha numeric instead of by free space so the sort is useless.

6- Remote Unix commands require “Observe” but not “Control” to be checked for the account connecting. And, in Panther the two have been combined so “Observe/Control” must be enabled 🙁 Under normal circumstances I would opt to have ONLY Unix commads and reporting (and maybe package installs) enabled. It also troubles me that you can run commands as root (sudo is impossible because it’s not interactive) even though the root account is disabled. Running as root is the only way to run commands that you would normally sudo.

7- Installing the version 2 client on Jaguar using an ARD created installer package will result in a Pref panel that is apparently out of synch with the plist. You must toggle the check boxes a couple of times before they reflect what the setting actually is. And, the installer actually hung the Mac in several of my installs.

8- There is no way to change the port number it uses unlike VNC.

9- If a file copy to multiple clients fails on one it fails on all of them.

Those are the highlites. Pretty pathetic for a 2.0 version. Apple also chose VNC as the basis for Observe/Conttrol but opted to rewrite it from the ground up without releasing their work to Open Source 🙁

[Anonymous]

Sucks? Hardly! Well… not entirely.

Regarding your mouse issues and the like, it sounds to me like a conflict with some other software you have installed.

Why are you still running Mac OS 10.2? I’ve never had ARD be anything but far better than the previous version when running on 10.3 or higher. All this jaguar stuff sounds like sw conflicts. These wouldn’t be systems that were all imaged from the same source, would they?

regrading #4 – make a feature request with apple. I’ve done it both through the web site, by complaining loudishly on the apple discussion boards, and by calling applecare and asking them to put in a feature request.

#6 sounds like pretty serious concerns. I’d definitely call that one in and get them to look into it for you. If it seems like a security issue to you, they definitely want to know and look into it. either that or they’ll get back to you in a few days explaining why it isn’t how it seems. I’ve had it both ways. (i call them a fair bit, as you may have figured… good folks, in general).

#7 – again, a minor bug. complaining to tech support will do you a lot better than doing it here.

#9 – that’s just plain obnoxious. I’ll have to try that out myself. not too different than other behaviors in os x.

–begin optional rant section–
it doesn’t matter what product it is… they make something all cool and full of neat-o new things, and they leave something very very basic (such as trapping errors in a batch process so the whole batch does not fail) completely out. THere’s something like this in every app. every one of them. it just makes me laugh, but more often i rant about it. I’ve settled on the following completely made-up theory that there must be one of the dark lord’s lesser demons scurrying around the cupertino offices influencing product managers and developers to help keep suffering alive in the world, in little subtle ways. Perhaps someone there made a deal with darker powers sometime way back and we all pay the price today. I know that’s how it went with microsoft… look at windows and all the suffering it causes. 😉
–end optional rant section–

at any rate… if you don’t like the product, talk to apple. i know fer sure that it can make a difference.

cheers

[Author]

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