Ever need to access your work machine back at the office in the evenings, over the weekend, or while on the road? It’s a common requirement these days – information workers needing to be productive while mobile. How does that fit with implementing a PC power management solution? With Verdiem Surveyor, you can centrally enforce power savings policies to achieve significant cost savings, while still giving end users the needed flexibility to “wake up” their systems anytime, from anywhere.

Working with an existing Verdiem Surveyor customer today, I came across an issue where the end user tried to wake their system via our Wake for Remote Access (WRA) capability and was unable to manually initiate a Remote Desktop (RDP) connection after.

Initially, the customer thought something was wrong with Surveyor. WRA reported a good ping response and indicated the system woke up; however, the customer could not initialize an RDP session or even get response to the remote system using a ping command from his laptop.

Turns out, there was nothing wrong with Surveyor at all. The customer had experienced a DNS issue, something commonly encountered with organizations large and small. The end user’s system woke properly. But, at some point, the client received a new IP address, and DNS did not update to reflect this change. As a result, the end user was unable to manually initiate his RDP session.

Luckily for our end user, WRA displays the client’s actual IP address as reported by the Surveyor agent vs. what DNS responds with. This is extremely useful information when troubleshooting a remote connectivity issue. After a quick conversation, the customer was able to connect directly via IP address.

Furthermore, a new feature of Surveyor 6 is the capability to launch a RDP session directly from the WRA results page. Based on my experience, most customers use WRA for this specific purpose. Anything Verdiem can do to assist in automating or simplifying the process is always appreciated by IT and end users alike. This is a very cool option that helps customers simplify remote access, and we take it a step further by configuring the session to connect directly by the client’s IP address reported by Surveyor vs. DNS name.

So, while Surveyor can’t fix DNS problems in your environment, it certainly can help work around them by reporting a client’s actual IP address and initiating RDP sessions to the current IP address. This is another good example where Surveyor goes beyond PC power management to add value to IT administrators and end users with a better computing experience.