"Pose as friend, then rob and leave in ditch."

I heart VNC. VNC has saved many a butt on many a dark and dreary day. Like today, for example. Now to be honest, my butt was never in any particular danger. But VNC helps me out even when it's just a matter of laziness that will define whether or not a job gets done in thirty seconds or thirty minutes.

So the story goes as such: I'm in a closet somewhere configuring some new servers. Recently, the consultant who installed them gave me the Administrator account password, so I could finally put time synchronization software and VNC on them.

But these are Windows Server 2003 machines. They bitch at every website that you visit and every file you try to download. And so just punching in http://www.tightvnc.com would have been, I don't know, annoying.

So I go out to a local file server and get the vncviewer program. My workstation downstairs runs VNC and doesn't complain about a damned thing. So I VNC into it, open a browser, and fetch the VNC installer. Then, also over VNC, I move those files onto the Apache HTTP web server running on my workstation. From there, I OK'd the servers to download content from that machine and all was right with the world. I used VNC to help me install VNC.

Of course I could have just gone to tightvnc.com, added that site to the safe list, and proceeded from there. But then I would have to have gone in afterwards and removed it. I trust that the day will come that I'll have to fetch more files from my workstation, so leaving that as a permanent entry makes me feel a lot better in the end.

As I was remotely browsing my own desktop, I noticed that I had another VNC session open there, and that I could have checked my home machine over VNC on my workstation from a third floor server over VNC.

I didn't though, because it probably would have given me a headache.