Hi,
One of the things that excited me about this addon is that it doesn't need any Citrix or RDP drivers installed on the host to get the support enabled, therefor I could use a portible version with the add-in installed and configured and just copy it to the server when I needed to use it. If I had my own server I could set it up to connect to that server at startup. Yes like you I wouldn't put the servers anywhere near ndaremote.com due to the keystroke issue.
Still a bit upset that after being on the beta list, then the server component wasn't released, there was absolutely no communication from the guys after this happened and the list closed. Any communications with the guys now about this just results in no response, and there reasons for doing this (i.e, someone could be tricked into connecting to a spoof server) I think would be the same for any remote solution. We now have another component that emulates the nvdaremote.com functionality, but this has now caused fragmentation in the community.
Andrew.
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From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Ryan Shugart [rshugart@ryanshugart.com]
Sent: 18 September 2015 00:50
To: Blind sysadmins list
Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] NVDA remote VS Window-Eyes or JAWS remote access in a datacenter environment
Thanks a lot everybody. I too am really surprised the server component hasn’t been released. However, my guess is NVDA remote was more designed with the primary vision of remote technical support, like a remote assistance thing and perhaps remote management of a machine second. Possibly very reasonable, I don’t know what the push to come up with this was.
I don’t think the nvdaremote.comhttp://nvdaremote.com people would like 200 or so servers suddenly connecting up to their server for remote management, and considering that you’re basically sending key strokes and getting responses back, I’d imagine that the corporate security types around would really not sleep well at nights knowing that was going on.
Today, I spun up a Windows 2012R2 VM in Azure and put NVDA on there and set up a remote connection between the VM and my computer. I wanted to simulate managing a remote server without setting up a test server at a remote office. One problem I ran into quickly was that while I could configure the NVDA remote session in my logon session to auto connect to nvdaremote.comhttp://nvdaremote.com, I couldn’t make the same change to the NVDA that ran at the logon screen. Because its Azure, you don’t have console access to the VM, just RDP access, so there’s no way to get to a logon screen to configure the NVDA there. That may be what Blake’s solution fixes, but I basically ended up needing to establish an RDP connection to the VM which started NVDA and then I could connect using the NVDA remote add-on. Blake, is this the problem you were referring to that you put in a request to get changed? For whatever reason I couldn’t actually send keystrokes through, when I tried nothing happened, but I could hear speech output, so it was kind of working, which was cool.
By the way, to Troy’s point, RDP audio actually functioned a lot better than I thought it would, I think MS has cleaned that up a lot in 2012R2. There was still a noticeable delay, and I’m sure Azure VMs get really high-bandwidth connections, but it was still very usable. Would I want to rely on it when connecting to one of our remote offices in Australia or South Africa, probably not, but still, credit where its due.
So, so far, I’m really liking NVDA Remote, and I think it meets a need, but I still finding myself wishing NVDA had RDP/Citrix virtual channel synthesizers like JFW and Window-Eyes do. The ability to just start a regular old RDP session, launch the screen reader and have speech just be piped through the channel is really cool, and considering how lean NVDA is compared to JFW or Window-Eyes it actually would make a decent screen reader in heavy use Citrix environments, so I’m a little surprised they haven’t gone down that road. But that’s just me.
Ryan
On Sep 17, 2015, at 9:49 AM, Blake Oliver