Remotely accessing the desktop…
Sometimes I need to access my home computer from work. Probably the easiest way to do this is with a Remote Desktop solution — there are lots out there. Windows XP has Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop” — which apparently is a pretty insecure solution. Also, most of the computers at the hospital are running Win2000, which doesn’t have the tool installed by default.
The other issue with that is, unlike ‘Remote Assistance’, the person at the local end is kicked off the machine…
Anyway, I poked around on the Internet for a while and found TightVNC. Perfect!
I still need to figure out a way to encase the VNC connection in an SSH tunnel (when I had a linux server on my LAN this was easy, but now I just have Microsoft machines… ick), but for now I can connect easily. Hamachi actually is a good way to do this – except I may have to configure some port forwarding on my router for it to work from behind a work firewall without going through Hamachi’s proxies (low-speed, since I haven’t paid them for a membership).
The only hiccup I ran into was, because of the firewalls at work, I had to listen on a non-standard port. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get VNC Viewer to connect on an alternate port — the port was open, I could telnet to it, but the !@$!% thing wouldn’t connect.
I guess I should have read the documentation. For some reason, despite standard notation being server:port, the VNC viewer you need to use server::port (two colons). Crazy. Anyway, that works.
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