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Complicated networking question and remote desktops?

Asked by george_rutkay

How does such a technology as Remote Desktop login function independently of the IP address?

I'll explain why.....I've been insanely busy at the family farm, learning all about this technology as I go!! EEK!!!

They run Win XP there over a 1 km long wireless connection.

Layout:
Computer and internet entry to the property at the farm building. Internet distributed by a DLink WBR-2310 on an omnidirectional antenna (should be changed I know, that will happen eventually). I've set up firewall rules within it to allow the necessary network paths to be un-firewalled.

Internet feed is received at the farm house by an Engenius EOC-3610S-EXT configured as a bridge. This bridge feeds a DLink DI-524 (also set up with similar firewall rules as done on the WBR-2310) and thus distributes the internet to the house residents who own the whole farm property. In the house are a pair of wireless Laptops running Vista ( that's why the wireless capabilities of the DI-524 are needed, the signal from the farm's WBR-2310 is too weak at 1 km away), one XP Pro box and an older Win98 computer dual-booting between Win98 and Xubuntu.

Yea, you can tell I've been busy, learning as I go since I'm the only one in the family who is comfortable enough with computers to even attempt something like this! I've become their systems administrator more of less.

I managed to set up WinXP Remote Desktop access between the XP Pro computers - one at the house, the other at the farm where the internet enters the property. Each of these I've given a fixed IP address. And this way the residents can remotely login and do file transfers seamlessly instead of how they have been doing it (put the files on a floppy or a USB stick, jump in the car and drive it over there, really a lousy thing when it's -30*C winter!).

Where is this question going? Please bear with me....

Ok.....I got their IP address as it's presented to the internet and I came home and from my Ubuntu box I used Gnome-RDP to log-in to their farm. I succeeded, I reached the first computer (the one at the farm property but I could not reach the ones at the house, that's another question?)

Today however it seems their IP address (which is how I've been connecting to them) has changed. I know who their ISP is though.

I worked at a company once where the head office was in Michigan and I'm here in Canada. We routinely logged in daily from work and even from my home I could still RDP the head office on my Linux box.

How does this Remote Desktop technology work independently of a computer's IP address? And how can a person such as myself log-in to a specific computer deeper inside the network, even behind the router-firewall at the residence where a problem will still occur?

Because with this kind of knowledge I can help them remotely from here if they have a configuration issue (which seems to be the worst that happens, they need help to adjust a program to run as they like or some other thing.)

Any good teachers here to help and advise me? :) Thanks!

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Jim Hutchinson
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george_rutkay (yaktur) said : 		#1

PS: The listed equipment they are using is stuff they already invested in, they didn't want to throw it away or be told that they wasted their money so I'm hoping that somehow I'll be able to set things up for them to allow file and printer sharing (that's still not working as it should).

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Best Jim Hutchinson (jphutch) said : 		#2

George,

You are right, this is somewhat complicated, and I may not be the best person to answer it but as no one else has I'll give it a go.

First, I believe the reason you can only access the one computer (at the farm) but not the other (house) is because the first one is connected directly to the internet and you set it up to accept a remote connection. The second (and any others) is on the local network (LAN) without a direct connection to the internet. By default, computers on a LAN are protected via the router hardware to prevent this type of access. So is the first computer but you bypassed that to set up remote desktop. You would have to dig further into your router and set up port forwarding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_forwarding) to the other computer(s). Exactly how you do that will depend on your router.

As for RD being independent of the IP, it can't, exactly. RD needs to know the address of the computer it wants to access. It's kind of like if you want to send a letter to someone who keeps moving. You have to know where they are or they won't get the letter. However, they could set up a forwarding service with the post office and you can do something similar. I often want to log into my home computer from work. Because I have a dynamic IP (i.e. it can change) I use a dynamic DNS service (http://www.dyndns.com/). With this, I can set up my own unique domain name (such as thefarm.gotdns.org or something like that) and then connected to that domain name which will be automatically forward to whatever IP I currently have. The flip side to this is that you have to have a modem/router that will talk to dyndns and update it whenever your IP changes.

So, in short, to do what you want you will to set up something like dyndns to allow you to connect to the main computer even if the IP address gets changed and then you will have to set up port forwarding (and maybe more) in order to get to other computers on the LAN. I don't use RD so I'm not too familiar with the setup. I use ssh instead which is more command line oriented (I think RD is gui based, right?). You can get a GUI over ssh but I only tried once and found it to be kind of clumsy and slow.

That may not be the most complete answer, but hopefully it will give you some of the bits you need to get started. Also, I don't have windows anywhere in my network so I don't know what issues that may add.

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george_rutkay (yaktur) said : 		#3

Hi Jim.

Thanks! I'll see what I can figure out.

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george_rutkay (yaktur) said : 		#4

Gee, I'm at home trying some of this information out....it looks like it would be better if computers communicated via smoke signals!! YIKES!!! What is a guy to do!