Remote Access

One thought on “Remote Access”

1. LOTS of free alternatives

   gotomypc.com is for people who don’t have a clue about computers and need a remote access solution. It’s also good for people who want to do whiteboarding and don’t have an integrated enterprise solution available.

   If you have the SLIGHTEST clue about computers, you can come up with better. Here’s what I’d recommend:

   1. Register for a free Dynamic DNS account through http://www.dyndns.com/ . You have to run a very small, lightweight client agent on your PC. This will allow you to pick a hostname which you can use to talk to your home PC all the time rather than having to memorize a (possibly changing) IP address.
   2. On your firewall (which you might call your “router” or possibly your “modem”), set up “port forwarding” (it may be under a screen called “gaming”) to forward port 3389 from outside your firewall to the IP address of your Windows PC. You can find out the IP address of your Windows PC by going to Start-Run, and typing “cmd”, then at the command prompt type “ipconfig” and look for the “IP Address” field.
   3. On your Windows PC, go to “Start – Control Panel – System”. Select the “Remote” tab. Click the option to allow remote connections. Note: If you have Windows XP Home rather than Pro, you don’t have this option.
   4. Run the Terminal Services client to connect. If you don’t see the menu option, just got to “Start – Run” and type “mstsc.exe”.

   Now you use the Terminal Services client included with every Windows PC to access your desktop from anywhere in the world. You need to make sure all accounts on that Windows PC desktop, of course, have VERY strong passwords or else anybody else can do the same. I’m guessing that you might need some more detailed help, but that would require some knowledge of your network topology. Go register for that free Dyndns account, and once that is working feel free to give me a call!

   Other alternatives (to name a few): * Using a similar config as above, but to Cygwin running SSH and port forwarding instead to have more secure communications. * Using VNC or TightVNC instead of the Windows Terminal Client. If you have Windows XP Home rather than Pro, you’ll have to use this sort of option. The limitation here: if someone is at home watching your PC screen, they can see what you are doing remotely. This might be good or might be bad. * Run Linux on that home PC. You have DOZENS of different ways to remotely access a desktop, which I won’t get into here. * Lease a dedicated server on the Internet to do the same thing. Virtual hosting solutions are available from around $6.00 a month to let you do this, but they tend to be VERY limited on disk space.

   What solution you pick is, of course, an individual solution. Commercial hosting like ImInTouch or GoToMyPC are appealing from an ease-of-management perspective, but if you’re just looking for an easy way to access your home PC while on the road, they are overkill.

   —
   Matthew P. Barnson

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