Easy GUI for Remote Assistance Support

While looking for a free and resourse minimal way to open up remote support sessions to Vista and 7 workstations I reinvestigated Remote Assistance. Looking through online documents it seemed quite easy to setup a group policy to allow for unsolicited RA sessions and setup allowed users to offer these.

This was all well and good but the fact remained that the interface on both the offering and requesting side was mostly hidden with either no UI or activation via the command line. To make this a little easier I created a couple of HTA applications to make the job a little easier:

RemoteAssist.hta - Offers the supporter a simple textbox and button to enter the hostname of the remote machine into and click connect. This just passes the command via the command line to offer an unsolisited RA session.
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/attach...1&d=1265100124

WhoAmI.hta - is designed to be run on the client and will show in large letters the hostname of the computer which can be read to the supporter over the phone.
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/attach...1&d=1265100124

Although this can and possibly will be automated much more in the future it seems to work ok for some of the more computer savy teachers to support the others easily over the phone throughout the school.

I push these out to different groups by adding a shortcut to the desktop using the following VBS (some not in code box as forum garbled it ):

AddLink "Offer Remote Assistance", "Offer Remote Assistance", "\\pnsdc\cdshare$\0RemoteAssist\RemoteAssist.hta", 1, "\\pnsdc\cdshare$\0RemoteAssist\", "", "%SystemRoot%\system32\msra.exe"


[code]AddLink "Offer Remote Assistance", "Offer Remote Assistance", "\\server\share$\0RemoteAssist\RemoteAssist.hta", 1, "

As it keeps killing the post I have put it into a text document so hopefully it will allow all the text

I made a little script for that and plugged it into the computer context menu in ADUC along with others for Remote Desktop etc. You obviously need to be running ADUC on a Windows which has msra.exe, but RA also works fine to an XP client.

Do you have the little script you wrote to plugin to ADUC?

Nowhere near the system with this now, but I think this is the "little script" I actually used. It's a JSscript, so needs to be saved as e.g. mrsa.js, and I always throw these things in c:\windows:

Code:

---

dN = WScript.Arguments.Item(0);
ss1 = dN.split(",");
ss2 = ss1[0].split("=");
wsh = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
wsh.Run("c:\\windows\\system32\\msra.exe /offerra " + ss2[1], 1, 0);

---

I add that as an ADUC context menu item via another script, but that's a bit too me-specific and wrapped up with other stuff to post here. It's not hard to do manually though, use ADSIEdit or SysInternals ADExplorer to drill down to here:

CN=Configuration -> CN=DisplaySpecifiers -> CN=409 -> CN=computer-Display

Now edit the "adminContextMenu" attribute and add an entry:

Code:

---

2,Remote Assistance,c:\\windows\\msra.js

---

Because I do that shortly after a dcpromo it safely assumes there is one existing entry (beginning with "1"). If there were two entries there already I'd change the "2" to "3" etc.

--

This basic and very useful context menu item principle works on other key objects in ADUC (e.g. Users).

I'm not sure what happens if you highlight several computers and invoke a script, because I never needed to do that and I've had better things to do on rainy days. Suspect they'll be presented to the script as additional arguments i.e. WScript.Arguments.Item(1), WScript.Arguments.Item(2) and so on.