To coin your words, I’m not sure how you reasoned some one “would blame Windows”. Where am I blaming Windows in this thread? Was there a post on this thread by me ranting about MS-Windows operating system because of Zone Alarm ? Which post was that? There was a post noting no one in our family knows how to do this in WinXP. Is that what you call blaming an operating system?
I’ve suggested to my wife she consider that. Her reply is she can not get another legally free firewall that is as good. And to do so at this stage, requires a long expensive flight over a piece of water called the Atlantic Ocean.
Good on ya … and if you had read my post, you would have read my wife does the same, from her office PC to her home PC. I did not mention, but she also uses Remote Desktop.
I use dyndns. I have been using it for over 3 years. I need that as it gives me my mother’s IP address so I can find her PC on the Internet.
But that does NOT help my wife access my mother’s PC. My mother is NOT trying to access our PCs. We are trying to access her PC.
As noted, Zone Alarm is setup such that one has to enter the IP address of the PC that is trying to acccess in the Zone Alarm trusted zone. Given that the IP-Address of the PC trying to access changes all the time, that means my mother would have to make that Zone Alarm entry all the time, and THAT level of navigating through Zone Alarm menu’s is well beyond the capability of my 83-year old mother in MS-Windows.
It has NOTHING to do with dyndns.
My wife set up my mother’s ZoneAlarm, last February, such that it will block external IP addresses. And in ZoneAlarm, according to my wife (at least for the security level she believes is needed) one has to open up the PC to IP-addresses one at a time (or list all the IP addresses that have access). Our ISP here in Europe has assigned us MANY dozen different IP addresses each month. We get a new one every 24-hours.
I think it is more the philosophy, … that if one has a family member who they trust, who is knowledgeable in Linux, then even if they live far away, they can immediately and easily access one’s PC to maintain it. That is a feature that likely could be advertised more.
As noted above, vnc “just works” for me. I explained how. I did not tweak nor tune 1 openSUSE setting. Did you even try the solution I provided on a FRESH install (before having possibly inappropriately tuned any settings)? That method has “just worked” in every openSUSE release since 10.1 (when I first started using it) and the only time it did NOT work was for a brief time in 11.0 when KDE4 caused some problems.
tongue in cheek on my part, but could it be because the distro has many users who prefer to rant after a release hits the street, rather than participate in the testing? Note we have a forum area (called Soap Box), NOT applications, where users who wish to RANT can do so there. IMHO users who have such complaints that are more a rant should post there.