Teamviewer: ArtsMan Technical Support

Theatre Manager staff should not required permanent access to your machines, except under very specific circumstances. The remote access feature in Theatre Manager is designed for one time, permitted access.

Remote Access/Support

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

  • The customer must initiate 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 the identity to the customer by providing the customer with the case number they created to continue with support (PCI requirement for second authentication).
  • The customer then starts the remote assistance software by either:
    • clicking the Remote Assistance button on the toolbar after logging into Theatre Manager. It is on the right side of the toolbar as per the above image. Since you must have logged into Theatre Manager to activate remote support, It is not active by default. -OR-
    • By starting Theatre Manager and clicking the Support button on the login page as per the diagram to the right. This is useful if you are unable to log in for any purpose
  • The customer provides two keys created by Teamviewer: an ID and a random generated 8 character password (containing numbers and letters and, unique to the session) as per the image below. Both of these are conveyed to the AMS 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 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TeamViewer users grows, so it is not possible to have a fixed set of IP addresses, because this list would very soon be outdated.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 URLs 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.