If you work in the computer industry you develop a collection of some folks you do some support for. Now I limit my direct support to immediate family and a non-profit as I only have so many hours in the day and these things often take far longer thne most would believe to fix. They follow my rules on maintenance and generally don't have problems.

I had been using Hamachi (sold to Log Me In evidently) to create a virtual private network that allowed me to semi-easily remote to their systems, but that proved fragile and I would sometimes have to walk people through signing on.

I was browsing DIGG and came across a post of various free ware apps. These lists are often such a gamble and are often the same old links. This time I was pleasantly surprised by one I hadn't heard of. Show My PC is an alternative to subscription based sites like WebEx or Gotomypc.

So a quick test on my home systems showed it worked and seemed simple. I called my dad up as he'd been having some issues and in less then a minute I had remote access to his system and we fixed the issue. Not bad and looks like a good solution for supporting my family through all those NAT'ed routers and firewalls.