Admin’s Arsenal: mRemote

I don’t know about other admins, but I manage a LOT of remote connections in a typical day. Some days it seems like I don’t do much other than look up passwords and user names for all the remote connections I need to make to get my daily duties handled, well it used to anyway.

I’ve used many terminal mangers, and the only one that had met my needs for managing all of the remote connections I handle on a day to day basis is mRemote. The author describes mRemote as:

mRemote is a full-featured, open source, multi-tab remote connections manager.

It allows you to store all your remote connections in a simple yet powerful interface.

Currently these protocols are supported:

• RDP (Remote Desktop)
• VNC (Virtual Network Computing)
• ICA (Independent Computing Architecture)
• SSH (Secure Shell)
• Telnet (TELecommunication NETwork)
• HTTP/S (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
• Rlogin (Rlogin)
• RAW

Now while this program has a “portable” version, it is not a portable application in the true sense of the term, as it depends on several applications that must be installed on the machine mRemote is run from to be truly useful. Here are the requirements for running mRemote:

Supported Operating Systems:

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Prerequisites:

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
• Microsoft Terminal Services Client 6.0
  Needed if you use RDP. mstscax.dll and/or msrdp.ocx must be registered.
• PuTTY
  Needed if you use Telnet, SSH, Rlogin or RAW. Included in all packages.
• Citrix ICA Client
  Needed if you use ICA. wfica.ocx must be registered.

ATTENTION!
mRemote was only tested under 32bit environments, so 64bit systems are unsupported but may run mRemote just as usual.

Bearing that in mind, all of the machines I would run mRemote from will already meet these prerequisites, so for me, it is as good as portable (I run it from my USB drive anyway).

Also there is a bit of controversy over this program, as the author is looking to take it commercial. However since it is currently open source, even if he does in fact go that route in the future, I’m quite sure that someone else will pick up where he left off with the open source version.

You can download mRemote from: http://www.mremote.org/wiki/