New MJ user question

isleblue65 · Post by **isleblue65** » Sun Nov 16, 2008 4:05 pm

Hello,
I've had Magic Jack installed for 2 days and I think it is great. I started with installing it on a laptop that accesses the internet through my Linksys WRT54G router on a desktop that stays on, but rarely gets used in another part of the house. I flashed my router to dd-wrt before installing MJ, but found the voice quality to be horrible and choppy. Then I flashed the router to Tomato, which is much better, but I still had breaks in the calls. Today I moved my MJ to the desktop and plugged it into my main phone wall jack, which fixed most of the poor quality issues. I now have both phones in the house working on MJ through the house phone wiring, which is great because it eliminated the wireless aspect that I think was causing some quality issues.

The only thing I would like to do now is to be able to see the MJ softphone on the laptop, so when someone calls I can see the phone number, and access my softphone contacts. I specified that the USB drive which the MJ dongle is plugged into be shared on my network, hoping that this would let me open the softphone on the remote laptop, but the drives show up as unrecognizeable files.

Is there any way to share the softphone with another computer through the router, even though the host PC has the MJ running on it?

Thanks

davrow · Post by **davrow** » Sun Nov 16, 2008 7:30 pm

It's not what you want, but you could do what many of us do with our Thin Clients and use TeamViewer http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx to remotely view the softphone on the machine the MJ is plugged into.

Smaller footprint than remote desktop, and free for individual use.

isleblue65 · Post by **isleblue65** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 12:03 am

Thanks Davrow. I have Teamviewer running on both computers now and I can see the MJ when it pops up. It's nice to be able to add to the contacts or dial the softphone from the remote computer too.

One thing I'm wondering is how long the Teamviewer sessions last. If it times out after 10 minutes of inactivity, then you would have to go to each computer, log into another session, record your session ID and Password and type the other computer's session password into Teamviewer. If you could leave it running indefinitely, that would be great. Maybe it just keeps active, I'm not sure yet.

isleblue65 · Post by **isleblue65** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 4:10 am

isleblue65 wrote:One thing I'm wondering is how long the Teamviewer sessions last.

I minimized Teamviewer on both computers and checked them several hours later. The session had expired, but since I hadn't closed the application on either pc, I just logged in again using the same session password.

davrow · Post by **davrow** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 3:25 pm

Thanks for the report on TeamViewer time-out activity.

I've never needed to leave it open... log in, check status, close it. So I am not in a position to provide the answer you just gave us!

Since the MJ Thin Client is the only computer I use TeamViewer to connect to, it always defaults to it when I start it. All I need to enter is the password, which is "fixed" on the MJ box.

isleblue65 · Post by **isleblue65** » Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:32 am

Which of the 4 Teamviewer options did you select:
1. Remote Support
2. Presentation
3. File Transfer
4. VPN

I selected Remote Support, but this requires someone to be present at both computers. On the Teamviewer website, it talks about having control of an unmanned computer remotely, but does not clarify which sub program to use for this.

I'm not sure I'll keep using TV for the purpose of viewing my softphone because it does not allow my PC to go into screensaver or sleep mode, and the windows desktop is always open.

maine-iac · Post by **maine-iac** » Tue Nov 18, 2008 10:00 am

I use VNC. Works great.