Re: VPN To Another User's PC?
- From: "Vanguard" <vanguard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:12:33 -0500
"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in message news:r3m5d3dvpgltb5oalcbf2nmom66s7rtlkc@xxxxxxxxxx
I'm on Verizon's FIOS.
My daughter, 100+ miles away, is Verizon's "Broadband" (seems tb
DSL).
My guess that in both cases the IP address of the PC is dynamic -
i.e. it can change from logon-to-logon, or even from
hour-to-hour.
I VPN to various client sites every day - but I'm hooking into
their VPN servers.
Is there any hope of me being able to create a Remote Desktop
Connection to her PC in order to troubleshoot some email issues?
You and your daughter are using dynamically assigned IP addresses. That means they can change. If you use dial-up, they change everytime you dial in. If you use an always-on connection, like DSL or cable, they can change when they expire (all dynamic IP address have an expiration). With the always-on connection, often you get reassigned the same IP address but that is not guaranteed.
So the problem with using Remote Desktop or some flavor of VNC is that you would have to know the other host's IP at the time you tried to connect to it, and that IP address might be different tomorrow. You need something that monitors the IP address of the remote host and provides an IP *name* to which you connect which then resolves to the current IP address of the remote host. Look into:
DynDNS.com
No-IP.com
Some NAT routers, for example, try to provide support for, say, DynDNS to act as their client (what monitors the IP address) but there are a couple problems with that setup. One, the IP address being reported is the WAN-side IP address of the router, not of any intranet host connected to it. That means you have to use port forwarding in the router so when you connect to the router on that port then the traffic goes to a specific intranet host. Two, I've found routers are a bit flaky when acting as the DynDNS client. Often they only report the WAN-side IP address of the router when it changes. For cable or DSL connections, the IP address may not change for months. That is, each time the dynamic IP address has expired, the new one happens to be the same as the previous one so there is no change. Since there is no change, the router doesn't report anything back to DynDNS. However, free accounts at DynDNS will expire after so many weeks of being idle. You'll end up getting e-mails telling you your DynDNS account is about to expire (or the IP name lookup you define with them will expire). If you don't access your DynDNS account in a few days, poof, you lose the IP name redirect or the account. I believe No-IP is the same way. Even if the IP address doesn't change, it is still a good idea to have the client access your DynDNS account to keep it alive. Because of these 2 problems, I instead choose to run their client program on the host to which I want to connect remotely. It does the reporting back to DynDNS and does it frequently enough to keep alive your account or IP redirect, plus I don't need to do any port forwarding in the router. The client only consumes 4.5MB of memory (0.8MB real + 3.9MB virtual).
Once you define a IP name at DynDNS, you use that IP *name* to identify the remote host in Remote Desktop or VNC. If the remote host's IP address changes, the DynDNS client running on that remote host will report it to DynDNS which will update the IP redirect so the IP name is still valid (i.e., it continues to point at the remote host despite the dynamic IP address change). When you connect using the IP name, the DNS resolution passes through your DNS server (because it isn't defined there) to pass it upstream to the next DNS server, and so on, until it gets the lookup from DynDNS' nameserver which returns the IP address for the remote host identified by that IP name.
Your daughter doesn't have to do anything to open and maintain a DynDNS account. You would do that. At DynDNS, and after creating an account with them (free), you want to define you want to define a hostname. You create something like <hostname>.<domain> (e.g., glendacresswell.dyndns.org). They have several domains to chose from, and you get to pick the username (as long as it isn't already used for the domain that you selected. However, your daughter will have to install the DynDNS client program on her host. In that client program, she will have to specify that she will be updated the glendacresswell.dyndns.org IP name that you defined in the account at DynDNS. Obviously you don't want just anyone changing that definition so the DynDNS client logins to your DynDNS account using whatever login credentials are valid for your account. You'll have to give those (username and password) to your daughter.
Using DynDNS or No-IP isn't super complicated but it does require defining a hostname in your account and installing their client along with configuring it to login to your account and to specify the same hostname as you defined in your account. A simpler method is GoToMyPC.com but it costs money. Yeah, they say "try it free" but that's just hiding that it is 30-day trialware. It costs $20/month with a discount if you prepay for a year contract. I don't think it does anything more than DynDNS or No-IP except provide wizards to do the setup (which can probably all be done from the client end rather than defining the IP redirect in your account and then making the client match up).
.
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