Sysadmins Need Lansweeper and Remote Desktop Manager Replacements
24 posts across 5 communities in the last 30 days; 71% from r/sysadmin.
“They are now going to charge for monitors. Their recent announcement will DOUBLE my annual costs. I used to love the product. Now I hate it and the company. They sit alongside Broadcom in my shit list. https://docs.lansweeper.com/docs/november-2026-billing-changes”
“10 minutes is alarmingly similar to a broken GPO issue -. Shudders in 2012.- Best of luck.”
“Not sure if i hate or love the name lol... like i get it but im not sure the c suite will when it comes to tool selection. See also chocolatey etc”
Multiple posts reveal sysadmins facing issues like accidental damage during polishing, unauthorized access points, and security breaches due to added hardware. These incidents highlight a loss of control over system integrity and potential vulnerabilities.
SOURCES (60)
“I have seen the same thing at home recently. Makes me wonder if there isn't some hack or day 0 that reveals user IDs. [re: A quick reminder on why exposing RDP (Port 3389) directly to the internet is still a terrible idea]”
“Claude. Write something identical to lansweeper with all functionality that I can drop in as a replacement. Make no mistakes. (Only half joking, a little scared that this might actually work)”
“Since Tailscale is built on Wireguard, that's precisely what all of us who use Tailscale for remote access actually do.”
“They are now going to charge for monitors. Their recent announcement will DOUBLE my annual costs. I used to love the product. Now I hate it and the company. They sit alongside Broadcom in my shit list. https://docs.lansweeper.com/docs/november-2026-billing-changes submitted by /u/hkeycurrentuser [link] [comments]”
“for encrypted chat with image/video sharing, matrix (synapse server + element client) is probably your best bet. it's got e2ee by default and the apps work well enough for the search engine crawler, look into yacy. it's a decentralized p2p search engine that crawls and builds its own index, you can run it locally and it'll keep working even when the net's down since peers share indexes also, maybe add a local dns cache like pihole or unbound so at least name resolution doesn'”
“Forcepoint is pretty proactive about addressing CVEs wihtin their software BoM and will even highlight whether it affects their appliances or not. Honestly they are probably the best NGFW vendor out there RN, just not a household name outside of larger deployments (and suffer from a lack of good SASE product).”
“Sometimes i feel that all we do with all these security products is move the goalposts, shuffle the vulnerabilities around…”
“10 minutes is alarmingly similar to a broken GPO issue -. Shudders in 2012.- Best of luck.”
“Well well always interesting to see someone, that thinks their reality is the definitive one. Tailscale didnt invent the naming in this context. That happened by Linux, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and others decades before them. Shame they didnt ask you before.”
“vendors acting like we are the strange ones The scary part is: you probably are. Keep up the good fight against the forces of complacency, my friend.”
RDS remote apps, and it sucks. But it works, and we dont use it a ton.
“Benefit of the doubt that this is sarcasm and that someone isn't actually scoffing at the idea of malware spreading via shared network resources and USB drives like ransomware and Conficker never existed.”
“I know, I run TrueNAS. It's just not the ideal setup, it requires a much more proactive data security/DR setup than letting a cloud service provider manage it.”
It's useful for servers, but end user machines? Definitely not.
“Ahh yes tell me youve never faced a software bug before or weird quirk your teams never encountered before”
“I meant what are the pain points that are making you consider something else, knowing that can help people suggest you a better tool”
“Not sure if i hate or love the name lol... like i get it but im not sure the c suite will when it comes to tool selection. See also chocolatey etc”
“long time ago tried to do an overworked friend a favor upgrading some server remotely. all went well until i rebooted the primary fileserver and it didn't come back. a $100 cab ride later, i got into the server room, turned on the monitor to see "keyboard error or no keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue"”
“Mostly won’t cut it. I work in cybersecurity and can tell you with certainty that when we have deployed an XP canary on the internet, they are found and attacked within seconds. You might not see it, but if you put that thing online once, it will be compromised. I highly suggest that you choose Linux. Ubuntu is an incredibly easy OS to work with.”
“yeah i'm not installing it. They have multiple ... "incidents" with security over the last 2 years or so none of which strike me as confidence boosting. I think you missed the point of the post friend. Do NOT "winget install" anything without checking first...”
“as others said, its an automated script, they are just port scanning whats opening and throwing everything at the wall; a shotgun approach hoping it will hit something other than a wall.”
“How does the one license per admin work? Will I have to log-in using username/password credentials?”
“we're using Batchpatch but my main issue is not all of our machines are connected to the network 24/7. We have machines that gets disconnected from the network for weeks/months and I'll have to manually patch them when they get connected again...”
“UPnP's whole literal reason to exist is for applications to work seamlessly for non-savvy users. Turning off it by default you may as well not implement it at all.”
“I guess the concern is any attacker will know those admin shares exist and if they had creds could end up with control of the device”
Asking AI to attack his network, and do whatever it wants to hack it.
“So what they think the command line is icky? It is icky for some things where a GUI interface is much better. I’ll even mix between command line and GUI. Which would you rather do? Right a long ass LDAP query to see a users primary email or just open the GUI interface and see what it is after a search. Need to know a bunch than command line it is. A skilled IT administrator will know when to use which.”
“How companies are getting ransomeware mostly? Is that outdated system? Or outdated devices? URL filtering issues?”
“I switched from LS+LogMeIn Resolve to NinjaOne. It is nowhere near the detail of LS but for our ~150 assets I wasn't going to pay LS prices either. It's fine. I didn't get weird sales tactics from NinjaOne.”
“I've used Lansweeper on-prem since 2014 for just a couple of purposes: Tracking approximately 150 MS Windows assets on the network and all associated software licenses. That's it. Nothing else. It's nice being able to see other types of devices that are connected (surveillance cameras, wireless AP's, switches, etc.) but I don't need that from this product. Their pricing has gone up consistently over the past several years while, at the same time, they've been pushing thei”
I never use guis for prod services. There is zero need for such things.
“Just wondering what do you use for antivirus a can of bug spray 🤔 Beter look for something else as you will get annoyed more over time believe me”
“They still haven't implemented or given updates on agent takeover protection. Been "coming in upcoming release" for a year, maybe 2, now. https://portal.productboard.com/b2qs6tgdln83deb1gv1w7agd/c/263--endpoint-takeover-prevention-make-agent-takeover-impossible-if-when-action1-cloud-is-hacked https://features.action1.com/c/263”
“No dude. OP thinks the guy should be demoted because he kinda stinks at his job excluding this instance and there are better options. This is just icing on the cake.”
“Why are people still so surprised when people bring up that your still using WSUS? Deprecated doesn’t mean unsupported, people”
“Professional support with SLAs, which often is also related to a compatibility matrix. When you run mission critical platforms and apps, the last thing you need is community support or an actual support contract that sucks or lacks SLAs, because then the buck stops with you. Also, many software vendors will only support their app on a hypervisor they’ve tested against, and most aren’t playing around with Proxmox. I certainly wouldn’t bet my career at a Fortune 500 on something like Proxmox, but”
“Yeah, this whole scenario sounds exactly like something that was rippling through my own friend groups on Discord a few months back. Whenever someone got hacked the trojan started pinging me from the hacked account with infection attempts. The thing was really quite clever, it was customizing the messages to me based on my prior communication with the hacked person. I assume there's an LLM behind it somewhere in the attacker's infrastructure doing that customization work. I'm a very”
“CIO of a $4bn org with a huge IT footprint here. Scrapped vmware and went to proxmox across the board. Proxmox is way better value plus our sysadmins/devs love it. Never going back.”
“I used it for a while when it was free. The feature set was pretty nice like port scanning, DHCP server detection etc. However I couldn't ever justify the cost when they changed their model, nmap, wireshark, advanced IP scanner, angry IP scanner have all replaced the functionality for me. It's a cool tool but ideally I shouldn't really need to run network scans very often.”
“That's OK. Maybe if it were free/open source more people would use it. It was free a few years back.”
“I've been burned by their shit more times than I can count since 2009 or 10. Starting to move everything into VMWare and Incus/LXD/LXC about 2 years ago was the best decision ever. I'm unfortunately still currently running a 6 node Proxmox cluster that couldn't be moved yet. VMWare is expensive as hell, yes, they tried to push everyone out, yes, but they do deliver. Everything else not so "demanding" works perfectly well on LXD. The irony of some of the people in this threa”
“I use incus nowdays. My journey was vmware/virtualbox/proxmox/lxd/incus Stéphane Graber is a king to me. Thanks to him, I got a something that works, is reliable and I can update without stressing much. I will migrate to incusos somedays ? Until then debian is my shaolin distro with incus on the top.”
“It doesn’t and they’ll just end up running Kubernetes and care less about the hypervisor, or go cloud.”
“because it's kinda shit everything can be done on plain Linux. lxcs are garbage. docker is garbage. fedora-based with podman is king. you can sprinkle in ansible/k8s if doing a cluster”
“No idea. But then again corporate keeps using windows and relying on other apps that I would never even touch. Or hardware I'd throw out the window if I had to use it privately. So this doesn't surprise me honestly.”
“Fair point, and it's the part we still don't do well enough. We check that the client can log into the accounts, but we don't run a full drill where they actually reach the DNS panel and hosting dashboard without us on the call. Recovery emails going stale is exactly the kind of thing that only shows up once you try it for real, not when you just confirm a login works.”
“yeah, the vast majority of these incidents end up being because someone just decides Admin is easier to just use all the time and starts surfing malicious websites. Yes, they could just remove the block, but if the whole issue is the user being lazy then they'll be pushed to just use their normal account.”
“Thanks, but for whatever reason, I have the queues well under control. Famous last words, I know. Now something's gonna blow.”
“Yep. Every single new windows update or hardware driver grinds my prod floor to a halt (prod here is making airgapped machines that are tightly controlled in config, down to drivers) Sure, I could wing it. But that's lazy and at worst fucks the customer, therefore my company and finally, me. Here's what we want do do. Here's what it says it changes. Here's what my tests show. Here's my best interpretation of potential impact. 99/100 it's totally fucking worthless. 1/100 w”