DarkMan

I now have broadband access on my home pc and would like to access it from work. I have tried the likes of VNC and remote pc the problem being they depend on my home pc having an external IP address I can see over the internet. I am using the Netgear DM602 router/adsl modem so the IP address that the likes of VNC are saying you can connect to is the local modem/LAN address not the WAN address the ISP has given me. So I can't connect to the address over the internet.

I hope this makes sense, is their anyway I can connect remotely to my home pc given my set up.

Cheers

[Edited by DarkMan - 3/27/2003 9:32:28 AM]

Fig

The ADSL modem will have the external IP address allocated to it by your ISP, whilst the router acts as a DHCP server to allocate 'internal' IP addresses to the PCs. It is the external IP that you need the remote software to see. These (external) IPs can/do change from time to time, but in my experience not very often. If this becomes a problem, you can subscribe to a dynamic DNS service - which gives you a permanent IP which is forwarded to the dynamic IP allocated by the ISP. The router/modem signs in to the DynDNS service from time to time to update/confirm the correct dynamic IP address.

Providing the router allows port forwarding (most do) and you know the port number(s) used by the remote software, you set the router up to forward these ports to a specific PC on your home network, then set the remote up to see the external IP.

I've probably made it sound more complex than it really is.

DarkMan

I've been able to find out the internal ip and external addresses. But when I look at the setup of VNC/remote pc software the ip address that it says the pc is, is showing as the internal one, which I can't connect remotely too.

stevem2k

As fig says , you'll need to set up your router to port forward to your internal address on the service you want. Then connect to the external address ort and it will pass it through to the internal machine.


Steve

Fig

I'm not sure if you can use VNC to do this, perhaps someone else has more idea,

Whereabouts in setup are you getting this info?

DarkMan

When you have the VNC server app running on your pc in the system tray, you can just hover the mouse over the icon and it displays the ip address that you can connect to. In this case it is showing the internal LAN address

Fatman

Since you're on a DHCP-allocated IP address, it's possible it could change at any time (my own recently reduced their IP lease time drastically). To address your PC, try using a dynamic DNS service, like DynDNS. You get an address like something.dyndns.org and it points at whatever your current IP is. It takes updates from a client sat on your PC, which queries it's own gateway IP and returns it to the DynDNS servers. And it's free.

Fig

Ah, I see where you are coming from now. This is where port forwarding comes in. Once the router has been set up to forward the correct ports to the PC you want to access, then VNC Server will listen for connections on its incoming port (still using the internal IP address) which will be forwarded to the equivalent port on the router (external IP) so if your external IP was 123.456.789.123 and your internal one 192.168.0.1, you set the remote VNC to connect to 123.456.789.123 and the packet will then forward to 192.168.0.1 automatically.

As I said previously, this is all "in theory" as I do not know if you can actually do this with VNC (or whether the router you are using allows port forwarding), but I do know you can do it with PCanywhere, because that is exactly what I do to access my home PC from work.

Your first step is a trip to the RealVNC website and trawl through the documentation to discover which ports VNC uses for incoming and outgoing packets.