So at the moment I am based in the UK and I support user base from Europe through to East Asia Pacific, some are in offices some are working from home. What I really struggle with is the remote support, and previously the answer was to just ship out a replacement machine from the US / UK office rather than attempt to fix. We are a non profit and the waste in terms of shipping, stock tie up and taxes really irks me! So Im wondering does anyone know of a ip based KVM unit that has a ddns client built in. That way I can get the end user to plug this in to their router and laptop and then I can get what I need done, even at a bios level. I have found ip based KVM thingies, however they either need to be on the WAN or i would need to configure their home internet to allow connections through. Any one come across anything like this? Regards,
To be able to support the computer hardware outside of the OS you're looking at lights-out management (LOM). This is generally only available in enterprise-grade hardware (read: expensive) as it's normally used to manage remote servers in in data centers. Dell iDRAC & HP iLO are the two that I have had experience with. By the time that you've included the cost of adding the hardware into each machine and configuring it you've added a huge cost to each machine that isn't justified for the rare occasion that you'll need to support a single remote user at a hardware level. When you add this cost to a server that is providing services for multiple users the cost is justifiable as an outage for the server would cost a lot of money in lost productivity. In the many years I've worked in IT Support I've never seen a workstation have any form of LOM card, only servers. What is more achievable is to get a subscription to a remote support client like teamviewer or logmein (there are others I can suggest if you go this route) to support the user within windows. You can install these as a service and they will allow you to manage the computer at the logon screen, so long as the computer has internet connectivity. Having this access will enable the majority of support calls can be fixed remotely, you then only need to ship a replacement machine for a hardware or major OS failure. Assuming that the BIOS is suitably locked down that the user cannot mess about themselves!
Typed a big reply, then my finger tapped the touch pad and i hit backspace.... Ill retype it out again a little later. Summary, I have Webex for remote support. Bios not locked down and users are all local admins...... (I inherited it this way!)
