I am currently using UltraVNC and was there when the product originally came out. I’ve used this product successfully both in home network and office network environments. But that’s intranet. I cannot get the thing to work for me when I am trying to connect to my stepson for instance in Florida, simply because he is behind ‘his’ router.
I am currently using UltraVNC and was there when the product originally came out. I’ve used this product successfully both in home network and office network environments. But that’s intranet. I cannot get the thing to work for me when I am trying to connect to my stepson for instance in Florida, simply because he is behind “his” router.
Our current setup is as follows; my connection is broadband and we have access to the Internet via an Earthlink account. Use a Linksys Wireless router for our home network. Our local IP addresses are 192.168.1.102, etc. The “usual” setup. My stepson also has a broadband connection using Brighthouse Networks as his ISP and is behind “his” router. His local IP addresses are also 192.168.1.101 or 102.
Now I have used those “MYWAN” IP address applets to find our public IP addresses and all, and have included these when trying to hook up via UltraVNC, but to no success. I would greatly appreciate any help you can give me regarding the proper steps, or if you can explain what it is that I have to do or what I do not seem to understand regarding this form of remote connection to a client.
Now I know about NAT and port forwarding but I have tried those, (maybe incorrectly) and this has also failed. What am I missing. please help. I trust that you will help me out, I can tell that you know what your talking about and it is not easy to find expert help on the Web, like yours. Please note: Both systems mentioned above both have approximately 1-2 gigs of RAM and run XP Pro service pack 2 operating systems with Validated and Activated licenses.
— Dwight Arroyo
I think you are really close to getting things working. There are two ways that we can probably get things running for you. The first will require a little bit of tweaking to the firewall at the remote end. You are right that you will need to deal with NAT to get things working. Since you will be originating the VNC connection, you may not have to do anything at your end. Depending on the version of the code in your router, you may need to follow the steps that follow with your router as well as your stepson’s router. To make things easy on your, have your stepson put a static IP on his machine. This should be just outside the range that the DHCP server on his router is assigning. Although not totally necessary, it keeps from having problem if the computer is shut off for a while and it were to get a new IP address when it was turned back on. This helps remove that as being a possible issue at some point.
This part may get a little involved, depending on which vendor and model number of router/firewall your stepson has. In the past when I have done this, the version of VNC that I was using required that ports 5800 and 5900 be opened through the firewall for connections to pass through. Check the configuration of the version that you are using to see what port number(s) that it is using. This will need to be done on your stepson’s computer. Once you have this, you will need to have your stepson set up some port exceptions (this exact term may vary depending on the router and version of firmware being used). You will need to allow the port numbers specified in the VNC configuration to pass through the firewall. This is where the static IP comes in handy on the local side of the firewall.
When setting up exceptions, you will need to give the rule an IP address to send the traffic to. This is the part of NAT that can be a little tricky to setup, depending in part on what it takes to get the traffic to pass through the firewall. Some firewalls also require that you specify the source IP address (in your case your WAN address) that will be sending the traffic.
You may have to set the exception up so that it will allow all the traffic through. I would strongly recommend against this because of the potential security problems that this can lead to. Depending on how often your WAN IP address changes, you might be able to put in your current WAN IP address and hope it doesnt change for a while.
Having given you one option, the one I am about to suggest may be a little easier. You can download a NAT2NAT add-on for UltraVNC. This might be an easier option to setup than what I tried to walk you through with the first option. In either case, I would suggest that you both download the latest version of UltraVNC to make sure you arent dealing with a possible problem in the software. One of these methods should get you up and running.
