When I started down the road to spectroscopy automation I had and still have the main controlling PC in the observatory and a keyboard and mouse extender over an cat 5 cable to a room in the house. While the main PC ran a script I could interact directly if need be. This worked well when doing a search for possible Be stars looking at one every few minutes.
I also have a cat 5 cable onto my LAN hub and could link via wi fi to any PC in the house using Radmin.
I now have fully automated the finding and capture process and do longer exposures without the need to inspect in real time. So I run a Python script that does all the work while I do other things. I keep a weather eye on it via a laptop via wi fi but I do find it drops out once a night on average.
Lamp switching is via a USB relay controlled by Python. All else is via two instances of The Sky X.
I think the video of the talk I gave on this at the joint BAA/AAVSO meeting is still available on this site.
Regards Andrew