Remote access, networking VPN

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Level 1

4 points

Remote access, networking VPN

Hi, I have a powerbook and an imac and also a couple of PC's on my network, all work really together. I am going to be working from home over the next few months and I am trying to work out how I can access other PC's and Mac's, storage devices etc back in the office location from basically anywhere I can get online. We have a static IP address from our ISP but I am not sure how to set it all up. If anyone has the time to reply it would help me out an awful lot as my ISP don't seem to want to know.

Thanks

Powerbook G4, iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Apr 16, 2009 12:46 PM

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Answer 1

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keggo

Level 1

45 points

Apr 16, 2009 1:07 PM in response to Niko K

Ok, first off it is not very complicated to set up; that is the good news. The bad news is that we need some hardware in place to allows us to VPN in. That part is not always simply because it really depends on how your network is set up and what kind of devices you have in place.
That said, you can always use RDP (Remote Desktop) and remote directly to a computer that has internal access to the resources you want. This is something that is easy to do with just about any piece of hardware (networking hw.)
All you will need to do is "port forward" to the internal target machine.
For example:
I want to remote into my work computer that has a private IP of 192.168.70.120 from my house.
At my work I would log into my router or firewall and tell it to forward port 3395 (default is 3389) to my target computer 192.168.70.120
Now I need to know my public IP. lets say it is 24.12.67.126; so when I launch remote desktop application i would type 24.12.67.126:3395 into the comuter field and click connect.
So what will happen is that my request will hit my public IP on port 3395 and the firewall rule i put in place will forward that request to my target PC on its default application port of 3389.

I know that was not very simple and possibly confusing but it really is not that bad. If you have more questions just post.

about me: Network system engineer: A+, MCSE, CCNA

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