How well does Apple Remote Desktop work over the Internet?

Solution 1:

Apple Remote Desktop will involve either having a VPN or open ports and static IPs. I think you will be much better off with LogMeIn.com's free version, which will require zero intraction from your family members and open ports are not necessary. You will need to know a user's credentials on their computer. If they require more privacy they can disable LogMeIn from the menu bar item, as it will always be on as long as they are connected to the Internet. I suggest adding a user to each computer with your name and one password—that will be one less thing for you to remember and if they change their password or don't remember it you can still help them.

I use both ARD and LogMeIn daily, but ARD is more than you need.

Solution 2:

It appears that it does do this, with little setup required.

See the Apple Remote Desktop 3 Remote Assistance tutorial here.

Solution 3:

ARD works better for remote support than other VNC solutions since it seems better at controlling the bandwidth needed to send a view of the screen over a slow connection.

Other than that, it's a plain old VNC wrapper if you only care for keyboard, mouse. It is fully featured in terms of shuttering the remote screen (to hide what you are doing) as well as can be set to remotely poll lists of hardware, script and control updates to tens, dozens, and hundreds of machines.

It doesn't do any sort of location brokering, though so you'll still need to manage the routers, port forwarding, client configuration and such as well as use dynamic DNS or BackToMyMac or Screens connect.

For most people doing light support, I'd recommend the Screens program over ARD due to cost, better integration and testing of NAT and how it provides DNS tracking to let your Mac know what IP your family's Mac is using at this very moment.

Solution 4:

ARD/Screen sharing works super great to servers with static/public IPs. Not so great behind a NATed home router with port blocking on a dynamic IP. It can be done, but you will have to go there first to set up the port forwarding, etc.

If you have an outside server hosted somewhere, you could set up VPN on your machine and the machine you want to admin too. (That's easy to tell your parents to click the VPN icon in the menu bar).

Also, I think you can use "back to my mac" to make all this easier, but I don't know much about the details.