Yes, that’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. Bare with me. After Logmein delivered a huge blow to occasional remote access users everywhere, I’ve been thinking about the state of Remote Control tools. I’m not saying this to list all the different options there are, and gosh there are many; but to look at what has made Logmein and similar tool, Teamviewer, become so powerful.

The one common ingredient with Logmein and Teamviewer are the ability to punch through firewalls and effectively remove the need for time-wasting port configuration. Logmein does go further by providing online status and other “Pro” features, but the big and valuable feature of these two utilities is in firewall traversal. If you’re a VNC, or Remote Desktop or Radmin user, you’re likely familiar with the two-step process of opening a port, creating a gateway server and connecting. This keeps your need to open the network to a minimum while allowing access to all systems internally. Why don’t we have an open source equivalent to this kind of tool?