Hello,
I'm a former phone support technician from Gizmo Corp. (Australia), and LogMeIn was by far the most useful tool in my arsenal. That said, there are a couple of issues I/we've had in the past that threw a spanner in the works.
Please note that I'm a FORMER employee of Gizmo and my oppinions don't necessarily reflect theirs.
Lately alot of our customers had severe DNS issues preventing us from starting an LMI session, resulting in sometimes hours of troubleshooting over the phone to no avail. We serve alot of 'older' customers, and as you can imagine, this makes things considerably more difficult.
As a dirty work-around, I've used wireshark to partially reverse-engineer some of the LMI client communications, and managed to get a list of hosts together. Sparing the details, I have an updated list of hosts the LMI client connects to on server X, and a small piece of software hosted on the same server (ie: http://120.140.160.180/hosts.txt, http://120.140.160.180/program.exe)
When the client runs the software, the server list is downloaded from the above IP, and merged with their local HOSTS file. The LMI client then runs, and performs its DNS lookups as normal.
As usual, the hosts file is checked first. The LMI client finds and connects to the technician console from this point onwards as if DNS worked. We're then able to take over to diagnose and repair their DNS issue, and revert the hosts file to its previous state on completion.
It'd be great if similar functionality could be integrated in the LMI client itself in case other people have the same issue (saves having an intermediate server and software). It seems to be a minor modification to include a simple hosts file in the LMI client executable. If a DNS lookup fails, try the IP directly, etc
Again the solution probably isn't for everyone, but all of my co-workers have come across the same problem in the past, and the above solution has worked most of the time.
Keep up the great work!
