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TeamViewer Remote Support

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Sat, 05/22/2010 - 19:13 — Doug
Theatre Manager uses TeamViewer for remote support. This is designed to never be active, unless the user contacts Arts Management and permits the technical staff to have access to their machine for the purpose of diagnosing a problem on a one time basis. It is to be disconnected after use per PCI requirement 12.3.9. Theatre Manager never requires permanent access to your networks for any reason.

The process for actual access to the remote machine is as follows:

  • The customer has initiated a support request that involves a phone conversation
  • In that phone conversation, it is determined that a timely resolution involves connecting remotely to provide assistance
  • Arts Management confirms our identity to the customer by providing the customer number or the case number to continue with support (PCI requirement for second authentication).
  • The customer then starts the remote assistance software. It is not active by default.
  • The customer uses the remote assistance software to generate two keys: a random id and a random generated password. Both of these are told to the support representative.
  • Arts Management Support activates remote assistance manager and enters both keys to gain remote access
When Remote Access is disconnected, another remote support session requires a new set of keys to be provided. The customer is in complete control of the session at all times with a visual indicator showing the connection status.

How does it work

TeamViewer uses SSH for authentication and brokering of session keys. It communicates with the master cluster is through DNS names, which delegates the brokering of the session to the TeamViewer servers. Connection to the routing server and KeepAlive server is done directly via IP addresses.

The servers are spread across the globe and located at large data centers, their IP addresses are not organized in common subnets or IP ranges. Teamviewer continuously top scales the server network as the number of TeamViewer users grows, so it is not possible to have a fixed set of IP addresses, because this list would very soon be outdated.

Communication is done to URL's of the format:

  • *.teamviewer.com
  • *.dyngate.com
By default TeamViewer uses only the outgoing port 80 (HTTP) so that no firewall configuration is necessary. Alternatively you can open port 5938 (TCP) for outgoing connections if you wish to block port 80.