Beginners Guide to Remote Assistance

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Hi,

I have a home network using both the linksys befsr41 and the wrt54g. I am running two xp machines and one 98 machine.

At my office I am running a windows2000 desktop behind a typical corporate firewall.

I would like to be able to take over and control one of my xp machines at home when I am in the office.

What do I have to do? What questions do I have to ask my corporate IT department? Is this even possible?

If anyone has a reference book that would be great too.

Thanks.

[thirdfey]

hopefully you won't even need to include your IT department in this depending on what firewall they are running. It's not remote assistance that you want to setup but remote desktop.

Step one is putting a password on the home computer which is required inorder to do remote desktop. Please make it a complicated password using uppercase, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters (!@^%$#*). If you put some eaily crackable password on your home computer than any Joe Blow could log into your home system and take remote control of it.

Step two is giving your home computer a static IP address which will make it easier in one of the later steps. By default your linksys router is setup to assign computers on your network an IP address. This is can change which is not what we want. Look at the network information you are currently getting assigned to your computer by going into network connections and double clicking your Local Area Connection and clicking the support tab. Write down the IP address, DNS, and Gateway. Go into TCP/IP info for your connection and enter that info in except for the IP address just add 20 to the last octect. So if it was 192.168.0.100 make it 192.168.0.120. Check to make sure you are still able to access the internet after entering the DNS and Gateway.

Step three is the linksys router. Log into the router, go to advanced I think than port forwarding and you want to forward port range 3389-3389 to the IP adress of your computer IP address using the TCP not UDP protocol. You are done here save your changes.

Step four requires finding out your address. Your ISP changes this on you every once in a while, some don't, most do. The best thing to do is go to dynodns.com or no-ip.com or some other dynamic dns client service and use their client software to assign a domain name to your address that updates when your isp changes your ip address.

Step five is going to work, loading the remote desktop connection client software on your 2000 computer which you can get from microsoft by searching for it on their website. Run the software and type in your domain name you got in step four and see what happens.....

Or depending on your work environment you could just ask the IT guys to set this up for you for pizza and beer and see what they say :)

Have fun

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Hi.

Ok, I followed your directions to the letter. My computer already had a password so that was easy. step 1.

step 2 I got the following information:

Ip address 192.168.1.103
subnet mask 255.255.255.0
Gateway 192.168.1.1

dns servers x.x.76.19
204.127.128.19

Then I clicked on properties and selected internet protocol tcp/ip and selected properties again and inputed all of the above information on the general page. So I also clicked Use the following IP address and Use the following dns servers. I did nothing with the advanced tab.

step 3 I went into the linksys router and port forwarded 3389 tcp for 192.168.1.123 I was able to get to the internet.

step 4. I went to dyndns and it said my ip address was 65.96.4.106 I clicked on Static DNS and registered it as rss.homeip.net

step 5 I wasn't at my office so I went to my win 98 machine that is on my network and installed the remote desktop connection. When I tried to run it I first just gave it rss.homeip.net and then I tried the ip address neither worked. I then looked at options and gave it all the options it was asking for

1) Name of the computer: Tiger
2) User Name: Bob Slotpole
3)password: xxxxxx
4)domain: rss.homeip.net

in every case I got the same response: THE REMOTE COMPUTER HAS ENDED THE CONNECTION.

So, at this point I am not sure what to do. One question I keep having is if the external IP is x.x.4.106 what ties that to the internal ip address of 192.168.1.123? Is it the port forwarding and then the other information like Tiger and user name.

The other interesting issue is my network at home is called Westerly When I did remote desktop from the win98 box it said to browse for available computers and it saw +Westerly but it would not let me expand to see any of the computers

Thanks for any help you can provide

[rss]

I did some more checking and on the linksys router I have the following:

ip address: 65.96.4.10
subnet: 255.255.254.0
default gateway x.x.4.1

dns x.x.76.19
x.x.198.19

those are not typeos. The subnet is different and the second dns number is different

[thirdfey]

since you are doing this from your internal network try connecting to the ip address from the win98 computer. Try connecting to 192.168.1.123 and see what happens there. The linksys routers don't like to have you connect to them from the inside out. It's dificult to explain but my old router would lock up when I tried to connect to my dynamic dns domain from inside the network. It always worked fine from outside my network, such as my work place.

A later update to the linksys router fixed the lockup problem though.

[rss]

since you are doing this from your internal network try connecting to the ip address from the win98 computer. Try connecting to 192.168.1.123 and see what happens there. The linksys routers don't like to have you connect to them from the inside out. It's dificult to explain but my old router would lock up when I tried to connect to my dynamic dns domain from inside the network. It always worked fine from outside my network, such as my work place.

A later update to the linksys router fixed the lockup problem though.


Ok hotshot, I managed to get this to work on my internal network. The problem was I had to enable my xp machine to allow being a remote desktop. You do this by right clicking on my computer and on the properties box click remote and enable. HOWEVER, Remote Desk top logs the home user off so only one person can view the desktop at a time. Do you know anyway around that, afterall, I only want to watch.

Second issue is netmeeting. I am able to connect to the machine through netmeeting and do what I want but I am not sure how to identify the machine at home when I am at the office. The office is a large corporation with a standard firewall, security, etc....

Lastly, back on the home network front I am trying to use remote assistance between my two xp machines. When I ask fro help from one I see the request but when I respond nothing happens.

Thanks again for your help.

[imaeditedbysowulo]

Not to be a partypooper or anything, but you should edit your posts and remove your actual IP address. Just put an x.x for the last two sets of numbers. No need to give your IP to the entire world when they know you're trying to set up remote assistance.

:drink:

[TripleRLtd]

Not to be a partypooper or anything, but you should edit your posts and remove your actual IP address. Just put an x.x for the last two sets of numbers. No need to give your IP to the entire world when they know you're trying to set up remote assistance.

:drink:Agreed. But real good advice 3fry.http://forums.windrivers.com/images/smilies/thumbs.gif

[NooNoo]

If nothing happens when you respond I would check that there are no firewalls in operation (xp has one) and that the relevant port is allowed on the internal network via the router.

[rss]

Agreed. But real good advice 3fry.http://forums.windrivers.com/images/smilies/thumbs.gif


I did make a couple of changes both in the original post and on my machine but I like the suggestion. Make sure it is not implicit.

Any thoughts about my problem. I was able to get remote desktop to work between these two machines and also netmeeting.

[imaeditedbysowulo]

I did make a couple of changes both in the original post and on my machine but I like the suggestion. Make sure it is not implicit.

Any thoughts about my problem. I was able to get remote desktop to work between these two machines and also netmeeting.

In your second post under STEP 4: it appears your IP address is still there.

As to your problem, have you already done everything that 3FS suggested?

I would enable logging on your home router. That way you can determine whether it's getting blocked from your corporate side or from your home router. Setting up port forwarding on most home routers is pretty straightforward, so I would bet on the problem still being at your work location.

[thirdfey]

Ok hotshot, I managed to get this to work on my internal network. The problem was I had to enable my xp machine to allow being a remote desktop. You do this by right clicking on my computer and on the properties box click remote and enable. HOWEVER, Remote Desk top logs the home user off so only one person can view the desktop at a time. Do you know anyway around that, afterall, I only want to watch.

Second issue is netmeeting. I am able to connect to the machine through netmeeting and do what I want but I am not sure how to identify the machine at home when I am at the office. The office is a large corporation with a standard firewall, security, etc....

Lastly, back on the home network front I am trying to use remote assistance between my two xp machines. When I ask fro help from one I see the request but when I respond nothing happens.

Thanks again for your help.
I have only used remote assistance once and that was a while ago.....so you only want to view what is happening on the home computer. I think you can keep your computer at home setup to be remotely assisted at one time. During the invite process you just leave the invite open indefinitely and ask to have the invite mailed to your e-mail account. You will get a file attached to that e-mail that you can edit in notepad. Open it up and somewhere in their it will have your home computers IP address. Change that to your domain name you got from the dynamic dns company and that should work for ya. Netmeeting and the last question I am going to have to look into. Well, are you trying to respond from the computer you are assisting or the computer you are giving assistance from. It has to be done from the computer you are assisting for it to work.