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Posted by Nicholas Brookins on 22 May, 2008There are many ways to control a PC remotely and a plethora of programs for each option. However as an IT professional for the last gazillion years, I’ve never been truly happy with them, and often resort to the command line for VNC and Remote Desktop (rdp / mstsc / terminal services). Nothing wrong with that - but it is a pain to manage multiple hosts, and it seems I’m always scrolling through the terminal history to find the one I need.
Windows Server 2003 shipped with the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in - available in Administrative Tools or by running ‘tsmmc.msc’. It gives you a sidebar for managing multiple hosts, but that’s about where it ends. It is not particularly stable, is somewhat cumbersome, and doesn’t even allow you to reorder connections, let alone organize them in any way.
There are also enhanced UIs available for flavors of VNC, but again none I’m familiar with do a great job of managing multiple hosts. So what if we had an application that did allow you to organize your connections, sort and categorize them, and import/export between systems? The kicker - this application would support both, that’s right both, RDP and VNC. It would also be cross-platform, letting you control Linux and Mac hosts from Windows, vice-versa, and all of the above.
I can’t even imagine how much time this application would have saved me- I should have written it 8 years ago. I envision easy adding and managing of hosts in a tabbed or side treeview format, similar to the interface of 
VMware Workstation/Server Console. Now I’m on a roll. How about a plug-in system for adding new formats, like SSH or even proprietary protocols - like PCAnywhere, radmin. We could probably even figure out a way to use it to control Virtual Machines as well - a one stop shop for all guest and remote systems. Future enhancements could include easy file transfer, reverse connections, protocol handlers for links like rdp://mysystem, or anything you help me think of.
So I think that settles it. Allow me to introduce ToastControl, the first CodeToast application. The idea is to build it in the open, and share the process through articles/tutorials and collaboration. On GNU/Linux ToastControl will be free, open source, GPL. On Windows it will be free with donations accepted for personal use - I have to pay for hosting somehow!
As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, ToastControl is little more than a concept - but worry not, I think we can get it into a usable app fairly soon. If you would like to help with the project or have ideas for it, please contact me!
January 29th, 2010 a.t 10:24 pm
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April 6th, 2010 a.t 10:51 am
Excelent