Last night Vancouver & area had a rare display of nocturnal lightning and thunder. So much so that I shut down the radio station as a precaution.
This morning, I decided to take advantage of the down time, and switch production computers. This will allow me to relocate the computer and transmitter to a more advantageous spot, and should increase range in the desired direction (it eliminates multiple walls).
Of course, several problems arose, not the least of which was issues with the remote control program (allowing me to control the PC remotely, as the name suggests). It turns out that the one I was using, TightVNC, does not support virtual monitors (i.e., it requires a monitor to be connected or it displays a blank screen). After troubleshooting, I installed UltraVNC, and it works (and much better, as well).
It's all kind of amusing, as before the change, I had carefully moved over all the necessary data and software to the new computer, and run it in parallel for multiple days just to ensure that everything was working. But Murphy intervened, and something totally different reared its ugly head.
Things were back to normal by about 9AM Pacific (Noon Eastern) and should be relatively stable moving forward. I might required a short outage later in the day to install UltraVNC on the computer (it was tested on another one I had lying around), but I'm hoping not.
Another example of if it works, don't touch anything!
What is a 'virtual screen'?
@carl-blare Modern graphics cards can generally render multiple desktop displays. In most cases, you have a monitor hooked up to one main display; you can also have multiple monitors, each with a separate display.
VNC software usually mirrors your main display to the remote computer, and allows you to control your mouse and keyboard. But in some cases, a monitor isn't present (or, in my case, the laptop lid is closed, and thus the monitor is turned off). Then, all you'll get on your remote computer is a black desktop, as no output is present. With a virtual display, a separate desktop display is created which is only shown on the remote computer. It will mirror the main display if it were present.
That's probably as clear as mud, but it's the best I can do right now.
I did have to bring down the production computer momentarily to install UltraVNC, but it's now back up and running. And all is working, including remote control.