Review: Apple Remote Desktop 3

• Article 18 of 89
• MacFormat, June 2006

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Anyone who's tried to manage more than one Mac at a time knows what a pain it can be. Upgrading software, setting preferences, running maintenance scripts: it all has to be done twice, three times or maybe more, depending on the number of Macs you have. Now consider the situation if those Macs are work Macs, not your own personal Macs, and they may be physically separated so you have to traipse around a building or between sites: you'll see what a nightmare keeping Macs up to date can be. And that's not even factoring in the endless user requests that never seem to be completely solvable over the phone. It's for all these reasons that most companies with a significant number of Macs - and any sense - tend to buy a copy of Apple Remote Desktop just as soon as they can.

ARD, as it's known in the business, is a combination of tools. For helpdesk staff, it's the ultimate user-removal tool. Not only can you view the screen of the user on the other end of the phone line to see what they can see, you can control their Mac and fix it for them without having to relay endless instructions down the phone. For sys admins, it's a great way to install software on multiple Macs without having to be at the computer: just select the computers you want to install the software on, select the software and ARD will do the rest. And for the IT manager who wants to know exactly which machine has which hardware and which software, ARD's reporting tools can be a massive timesaver.

ARD 2 had a reasonably good feature set, but ARD 3 adds to the list considerably, particularly if you've made the move to Tiger on your Macs. For helpdesk staff, the biggest improvement has been the addition of a 'curtain mode'. Previous versions of ARD allowed you to view and control the mouse and keyboard of any Mac in ARD's list of computers, but you can now stop the end user from seeing what's going on, locking the screen and putting up a message to prevent them from interfering.

Another useful feature is the ability to drag and drop files between your own computer and the controlled machine's screen and the ability to copy and paste text and images - very handy for entering software serial numbers from your own computer's database into new software that needs registering.

Performance seems to have improved as well, with the slow screen redraw rate of previous versions much better this time. Similarly, some of the 'issues' around using ARD to control and monitor Windows and Linux machines using VNC have been fixed, although there's no equivalent to the ARD client for either platform yet. This makes ARD pretty much an admin tool only for Macs - and Macs with OS X 10.3.9 or later. With many companies' operating system update cycle still running at three to six years, that makes ARD 3 quite exclusive in what it's going to work with effectively.

For sysadmins, the same tools as before are there, but there's now the ability to run any Unix commands you like as whatever user you like on any machine or group of machines. Again, for anyone familiar with the command line, this is a massive timesaver: no more having to enable Remote Login on each Mac, remember an id and password for each machine and work through the standard sudo/su combos before running the commands. The remote installer tool has also been improved to allow for data encryption and bandwidth throttling, ensuring that your admin tasks don't swamp the network. Perhaps most impressive of all is the ability to schedule software updates for mobile devices: if a laptop connects to the network, ARD can automatically install designated software as soon as it spots the laptop.

The existing remote copying facility has been improved. This allows you to copy a file to any particular location on a remote Mac, forcing the Mac to open it after the copy if necessary. Apple has certainly improved the speed of the copy, although the 11x speeds promised were definitely outside of our reach. In combination with the installer tool, that means updating most software packages remotely is possible with ARD. However, since the installer tool only works with Apple's .pkg and .mpkg files, not the custom installers available such as InstallerVISE, there is still going to be a class of programs that will need to be updated manually, maybe using the 'curtain mode'. That means ARD isn't going to be a panacea for installation issues, although industrious admins will no doubt find clever solutions to most problems.

One particularly nice feature of the new ARD is the task server option. This allows one computer on the network to run as a server for ARD instructions: the admin sets up tasks that need to be performed on or by individual machines and passes them to the task server. When the client machines appear on the network, the server automatically performs the tasks. It can also act as a data gathering point for the various data reports that IT managers can request. Since Apple has wisely chosen to change the port that ARD's built-in PostgresQL report database uses, you can now run ARD on a server without any difficulties as far as we can tell.

Indeed, for the paranoid IT manager, ARD has a welcome new set of features. User history reports let you know who's been logging on to which machines, at what times and how: why's little Jimmy been accessing that school Mac at 6am from a remote connection? You may never find out and he may deny it, but at least you now have a simple way of knowing he's been doing it. There's similar mileage to gained from the Application Usage reports, so you can find out which applications have been used and by whom. We found that ARD didn't work especially well at either of these two tasks without having a task server on the network for the automatic collection of data. More often than not, a whole host of application launches and logins weren't recorded, and when they were, ARD only reported the most recent usage, making it hard to drill down into data to track down patterns of bad behaviour.

ARD really comes into its own, though, with its use of Tiger technologies. You can search for files on any other OS X 10.4 machine on your network using ARD's Spotlight integration. There's a Dashboard widget so you can bring up a monitor of any individual machine with a button click - useful when there's a temperamental server or user that needs close attention. There are also 30 Automator actions for automating tasks.

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