http://www.remobo.com
This one is an interesting find, and I will tell you now that it is in beta, so not everything works flawlessly, but this is an app worth keeping your eye on.Remobo is part social app, part bittorrent, part remote control and part VPN - think of it as Hamachi + BitTorrent + VNC + Windows Networking.
I love BitTorrent, as it makes downloading large files painless - just start the download and go...eventually the file will get to your computer, but you don't have to worry about stopping the download, or turning your computer on & off, etc. - as long as your BitTorrent client is open, it will continue to download the file until it is done.
The more people that have the file, the faster your download goes!
Remowha?
Strange Web 2.0-ish name aside, Remobo does have an interesting twist in the BitTorrent game: It is made for "buddy" file sharing between two or more trusted users via VPN. Instead of the typical "download from everyone you don't know", this system connects friends together to share files privately.
When you install Remobo it will ask if you want to also setup the freeware BitTorrent client from www.bittorrent.com - but you can opt out of this if you have a valid BitTorrent client installed already.
VPN!
Like Hamachi, Remobo works by creating a new Virtual Private Networking adapter on your system so you can run it in conjunction with your LAN setup and not experience any interruption in service because of the other connection.
Remobo also features a remote control option, which is really yet another implementation of VNC. While this is handy, I don't know if it is necessary (or finished) at this point. Currently, you remote control a computer by using the same password as that person would use to log into Remobo.
I'd much rather see a separate password or permissions scheme myself - sharing my Remobo password isn't really a good thing - am I right?
BitTorrent your files!
Sharing a file is a matter of clicking 'My Shared Files' and browsing for a file (or folder!) that you wish to share via torrent. Creating the torrent file does take a little longer than expected depending on the overall size of the shared resources, but works perfectly. These torrents are available for your buddies to download from their Remobo clients.
When you add a buddy, you can click on the computer name (which is an arbitrary name specified by the owner of that computer) and a number of options appear, including:
- View Shared Files
- Send a File
- Send Instant Message
- Remote Control
- Windows File Sharing
View shared files: Clicking on 'View shared files' takes you to a webpage listing BitTorrent links to the remote computer's shared files, - showing owner name and download size. Clicking the file will open your default torrent app and allow you to download the file. BitTorrent is nice, but I like Azureus/Vuze as it gives me a few more options before I choose to download the file(s).
Send a file:
Sending a file (note that this isn't quite the same as 'Sharing a file') is very simple, and upon selecting a file and clicking 'send', will prompt the user on the other end with a dialog box asking if they would like to accept the file - transferred via BitTorrent, btw - You can specify to share the file in the future to all buddies as well.
Send an instant message:
Sending an instant message is a simple and no-frills way of chatting with the remote user - no cheesy smileys or other emoticons here, thankyouverymuch.
Remote control:
Connecting via remote control is also a simple affair...seemingly. I could not get this to work, most likely because I already had VNC installed, and I think Remobo was getting confused as to which password I was supposed to use. I tried my Remobo password as well as the other passwords I normally use on that system, but no. It seems this feature needs a little work.
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't totally clear what password I was supposed to use to connect, but I was informed via the technical support forums that it is the remote buddy password (see aforementioned comment about my problem with this feature).
Windows file sharing:
The Windows file sharing feature has to be THE easiest implementation of file sharing in any non-tech remote connection software I've seen. Simply click the 'Windows File Sharing' option, and you will either be prompted with a username/password prompt for the remote station or an explorer window with files/folders listed for your perusal. Granted, you can still try to connect by right-clicking 'My Computer' or use a 'net use' command, but hey, the easier, the better!
One concern
I noticed that my Remobo password is stored in clear-text in the registry, which is also my remote control password. You can understand my concern. I would hope that as this software reaches its final version that this becomes eh...encrypted?
Likes
- Easy to use and setup
- Easy to share and download files, both via Windows Sharing and BitTorrent
- Simple chat not overburdened by needless features
- All the right stuff
- Remobo password is saved in clear text in registry, which technically is also your VNC password...
- Remote control gets confused if you already have VNC installed on remote computer
- Larger torrents take long to create, but this is probably unavoidable
- Startup is a bit slow
- No place to change your username information - you have to do it through the registry
Support forums are available.
6 comments:
So it's like really lot of existing stuff slapped together? :) Any actually original and interesting functions?
Combining functions is nice... Until you try to convince friends to install yet another IM or P2P app. That sucks. :)
It's not so much that it's "slapped" together, but that it is all quickly and easily installed...so no real knowledge is required to get all of these functions installed in one go.
It doesn't appear that Remobo has a limitation on 'buddies' like Hamachi does, so there's an advantage there, and it makes it a bit easier to perform normal Windows file sharing...not only that, but it is a VPN solution, and there's not too many of those around (there are others besides Hamachi, but this one is pretty user friendly).
As for something original, I suppose creating a torrent file by merely browsing to a file or folder is original. I mean, it's a one-click affair.
You may not like it, but I'm sure others do! :)
I like the idea, nice! Although in Vuze, you can just drag a file to any of your friends on the friends bar to share it instantly. Quick, easy and fast. You can even do it even if you're on a one-hand surfing trip (if, you know what I mean) lol
Hello from the Remobo team: we're glad that Remobo is userful & fun to play with for our users. Your feedbacks are highly appreciated.
For the cleartext password problem, it's a serious bug and we'll fix it as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the short-term workaround is to NOT have Remobo save your password to login automatically (ie, don’t check the checkbox at Login Window , and your password will not be stored locally at all).
To change your Remobo password, for now, the only way is through the login window: there is a text-link that says "Reset Password" at the bottom of the Login Window. Click on it and you'll be able to change or reset your password. If you're already logged in, you'll have to logout, and re-login again. Let us know if this is inconvenient for you.
For existing VNC installation, thanks for pointing it out and we'll work on it to provide better integration. For large torrent file creation, we'll see if we can tune it up a bit. These are all great feedbacks that help improves the Remobo's user experience.
Remobo is designed with the goal that users should have the freedom to choose whatever applications they'd like to run in a secure & non-hassle way. In additoin to those built-in applications (as mentioned in this blog) that you can run out-of-box , you can also run whatever IP-based networking applications on your Remobo network and connects to it via dynamic DNS name of {location-ID}.{user-ID}.remobo.com, which is provided by Remobo Service that resolves into the Virtual-IP (7.x.x.x) assigned to your Remobo Machine.
Feel free to post your questions at Remobo forum:
http://www.remobo.com/community/
Cheers,
--- Jeffrey
Great post... the cleartext password and VNC issues are now fixed in the new version. Great job pointing those issues out!
Remobo has a promising future as a replacement for Hamachi. I was using Hamachi as the "VPN component" and UltraVNC as the remote desktop component to support my clients. However, Hamachi decided to "go commercial" which forced me to drop Hamachi and simply use UltraVNC - which has its own encryption so that's not too big a deal - except I have to use DynDNS now to deal with a client's dynamic IP address.
Hopefully Remobo when they come out of beta and presumably will begin charging for a "Premium" version will allow the basic use of the product for "commercial" purposes such as IT support. I can live with some limitations as long as I can get the basic VPN capability and then run UltraVNC or some other remote access product over the link. I really need the VPN just to make it easy to deal with firewall and NAT issues.
You would have thought since LogMeIn already had a "pay for play" product that they could have kept Hamachi a bit less "commercial".
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