Background control of a networked pc?

[wirednuts]

i have this htpc in the livingroom, and basically i want another way to control it, but i want to be able to do it when other people are using it, or watching something.

example, someone playing a game on a webpage, and the tv in in the corner showing nascar... right now i just want to fire up jr media center and start playing music without effecting peoples current activity.

i know jr can do that within its own software, i was just wondering if there was programs that could control anything. basically like a silent vnc or something. was that what telnet was like?

 

[Nothinman]

No, consumer versions of Windows are limited to 1 RDP session at time. There are hacks to make multiple sessions work but I wouldn't trust them.

And no, telnet is just a clear-text way to get a remote command line. SSH is the preferred method because it's encrypted but the Windows command-line is pretty limited.

 

[Kaido]

One alternative is you could install a Windows OS into VMware and map the audio to it. That way you could minimize it and then remote into that to control the music on that machine without interfering with the person using the host OS (assuming you have the hardware to handle it). There are some tricks you can do to speed things up, like use TinyXP for performance and TrayIt! to minimize the window to a tray icon so that the user doesn't accidentally click on it:

http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm

Another alternative, if you have an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, you can use JumiRemote to send commands and then setup global hotkeys to run your music app, something like AutoHotKey or MacroExpress, and then use TrayIt! to hide the music app from the desktop. That way you can shoot music change commands without interfering too much with the user (if you use weird global hotkeys that no app would actually use):

http://www.jumitech.com/index.php?page=tap

 

[goobernoodles]

I'm sure this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it might be somewhat of a workaround for you, or just another helpful tool.

PsExec and RCMD are both ways of having a remote command line. RCMD requires installing the service on the computer you wish to control. If I recall, psexec doesn't. You just need to have the appropriate permissions on the target machine.

If you can script what you want to do (ie, open and play music on shuffle) you can execute the script from a remote machine. It could be a primative way of getting your desired results. The hard thing is to figure out if it's possible to do what you want from the command line, then get it working in a script.

PsExec: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553
RCMD: http://www.petri.co.il/download_free_reskit_tools.htm (Scroll way down)