Tutorial: Goto My Pc for FREE - Discussion

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Use this thread to ask questions or make comments on the Goto My PC - for FREE!! tutorial.



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[krtxmrtz]

Services like GotoMyPc, allow you to access your computer securly from any location in the world via a web interface. But, at a price. In this case $17.95 per month.

Well, what do you think about NTR connect ? This one's free of charge ! (...for now...)
I'd like to hear the experts' opinion.

[agmorgan]

Doesn't TightVNC do this as well?
http://www.tightvnc.com/

Or am I missing something?

[visualAd]

Doesn't TightVNC do this as well?
http://www.tightvnc.com/

Or am I missing something?

It doesn't appear to offer encryption though.

How secure is TightVNC?

Although TightVNC encrypts VNC passwords sent over the net, the rest of the traffic is sent as is, unencrypted (for password encryption, VNC uses a DES-encrypted challenge-response scheme, where the password is limited by 8 characters, and the effective DES key length is 56 bits). So using TightVNC over the Internet can be a security risk. To solve this problem, we plan to work on built-in encryption in future versions of TightVNC.

In the mean time, if you need real security, we recommend installing OpenSSH, and using SSH tunneling for all TightVNC connections from untrusted networks.

[john tindell]

Just to add.

You need to be able to locate your computer when your not at home and remebering IP addresses is hard, especially if you have a dynamic IP, how ever there are loads of services that offer a service which allows you to map a free subdomain name, or if you pay, a domain name, to your computer. Most routers that you will find in the shops offer support for these services with the most popular, well the one i use, dyndns.com.

[dee-u]

As stated by john, I will have a dynamic ip that will be provided by my ISP, how can I make it such that I could use the dynamic dns as provided in the link given my john? Will I just be using the IP given in that dynamic dns I created? Thanks for any guidance...

[kfcSmitty]

The program I always use is at www.no-ip.com

This program runs on the host computer, and converts the IP address into a DNS.

IE) my home computer is kfcsmitty.servehttp.com

Its pretty easy to set it up as well, there is a manual on the site

[dee-u]

Does it mean I'd have to use the IP that is being returned when I ping my dns?

[kfcSmitty]

you can ping the DNS. All it does is redirects anything to that address to your IP address.

So for all purposes, that is your IP address.

Like, to check out my website, I use that address, to shell into my computer, I use that address, to log into my ftp, i use that address, etc.

The Updater automatically feeds the IP address to the DNS while its running

[dee-u]

Thanks, it's getting clearer to me now. Will try the remote connection when I get to the office tomorrow...

[visualAd]

Make sure you use the hostname given to you by no-ip rather than the IP address. Also, if your work place do not route out to the intenet through the default gateway, you will have to enter you procy config into putty.

[dee-u]

I seem to have a problem with your step 5, whenever I tick the option for "but forward only to localhost (127.0.0.1)" then click Apply and Save then hides it, when I double click the icon again that option is unticked, what seem to be the problem?

[visualAd]

You need to make sure you tick the box above too.

[dee-u]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing but still it's getting automatically unticked, I've followed all your steps and it's only the one that I cannot set. BTW, can I make it such that I'd be able to test the remote connection in the same pc? And do I have to make Telnet active?

TIA

[visualAd]

I am not sure why that would be. Have a go at uninstalling nad reinstalling the SSH server. That option is not essential however, it just adds to security.

[larrinh]

I followed your instructions and everything went so smooth I figured I must have done something wrong. But I was wrong in thinking that. This is an awesome tutorial! Thanks.

One question, how can I improve the quality of the video? Everything appears in low res.

Larrin

[visualAd]

A virtual desktop is not really suitable for playing a video over. You can manually set the colour depth if you go to options before connecting, but it is worth remembering that VNC selects the most appropriate depth for the speed of the connection. If will therefore most porbably become slower.

Port forwarding can be done for any port however. So there is no reason why you cannot add a loopback adaptor on the connecting PC and map it to port 139 on the server. You can then access shares on the server as if they were on a PC on your local network and then download the files you need.

[larrinh]

Thanks! i figured out the video question within minutes of my post.

"Port forwarding can be done for any port however. So there is no reason why you cannot add a loopback adaptor on the connecting PC and map it to port 139 on the server."

I am a complete NOOB to this. What is a loopback adapter and how do I add it? Do I have to configure anything on my server's router for the port forwarding or is the forwarding of port 443 enough? Any help would be appreciated.

Larrin

[visualAd]

Sorry, I mean tunneling. Tunneling is a kind of portforwarding. A loop back adaptor is a network interface that does not exist. The default loopback adaptor is the localhost interface, assigned the address 127.0.0.1. If you want to access shares on the server you need to map port on the server to a local port on the host in the same was you mapped port 5900 for VNC.

The only problem with Windows file sharing port 139 is that it is already being used by the localhost interface so you need to map it to another. Adding another loopback adaptor allows you to give the PC an addditional IP address accesssible only to the PC.

Have a look at this tutorial: http://www.bitvise.com/file-sharing.html

[larrinh]

Thanks for the help. I got a lot of this stuff figured out but I have a new question. Can I run a local app on my work PC and have it access the internet through the VPN connection to my home pc? The reason is that my home ISP provides a very good newsgroup list and I can not access it remotely. Therefore I would like to run Agent on my work PC to log into my home ISP news server. Can this be done? How?

[larrinh]

I figured out how to run an app such as a news reader from my work pc, connecet to my ISP's news server via a secure tunnel to my home pc. You add a tunnel to Putty as follows:

Connection is "LOCAL"
Source port is "119" (for NNTP connection)
Destination is "news-server.yourisp.com:119" (Fill in your NNTP server address here)

You then enter "localhost" in your news reader program as the news server address.

Note: The connection from your home PC ( SSH server) and the news server is not secure!!!

It is really simple once you get it figured out. This stuff is too cool.

Larrin