The Show feature allows the NetSupport School Tutor to send a real-time view of their screen to each of the Student machines. This may be useful to demonstrate a piece of software or the actions that the Tutor is performing. NetSupport School allows you to show to a selected machine, a predefined group of machines or an ad hoc group of machines.
Within NetSupport School, there are two different methods used to perform a Show:
-
- Normal Show (Reliability mode)
- Broadcast Show (Performance mode).
Normal Show mode
Normal Show mode uses the TCP protocol on port 5405. Using this method, the Tutor sends its screen to each machine in turn sequentially. For example, if you are showing to two machines, the Tutor first sends data to machine one, then when all the data has been sent to that machine, moves on to the next machine.
This method must be used when showing to machines that are on different IP subnets.
Advantages:
-
- Good show performance for fifteen machines or less.
- Does not use UDP broadcasts and will work in all network configurations.
Disadvantages:
-
- As the number of machines in the show increases the performance of the show will decrease.
Broadcast Show mode
Enabling Broadcast Show mode results in the screen information being sent to all machines simultaneously. Broadcast Show sends out a UDP packet to all machines on port 5421 by default. In some network environments, where there is limited network bandwidth available or when showing to larger numbers of machines, this will provide significant performance benefits. Whilst reducing overall network traffic generated by NetSupport School, using this feature will generate additional broadcast packets on your network.
Advantages:
-
- Greater performance than normal Show mode.
- Performance of the show will only slightly decrease when the number of machines increases.
- This method uses less network bandwidth than the normal Show mode.
Disadvantages:
-
- Cannot be used if UDP broadcasts are suppressed.
- This method cannot be used if the machines are on different IP subnets.