Notices

thanx. cud be so. but what about from other wifi? e.g. my parents house or even my neighbour's router?

so we know from this that your PC is set up to accept RDP on the default port OK and that your firewall is port-forwarding correctly. Good start :-)

sounds like you are doing the right thing but worth checking. The Local IP on your PC is a private address (most probably 192.168.x.x). As it's static, this IP won't change - but it's still not accessible outwith your own home LAN. The "real" IP of your router should be a public IP. This public IP will NOT be 192.168.1.1 (or 192.168.0.1 or similar - which is the routers internal IP on the LAN).

To double check, got to www.whatsmyip.net on the n900 browser while it's connected to your local LAN, this will show you the public IP address assigned to your router by your home ISP. Lets call that IP a.b.c.d.

If this is the IP you normally use to control your router settings in your browser (which I doubt) then it must be a static public IP, and I then have no idea why it's not usable from outside your LAN to give RDP access (it should be OK on both 3G and other wifi networks ... although you really need to start worrying about security!)

If a.b.c.d is NOT the IP you normally use to control the router (i.e. you normally use 192.168.1.1 or similar), then this is where you've been going wrong. To RDP into your home PC from outwith your own LAN you would have to use the public IP a.b.c.d.

To further complicate things, if a.b.c.d is not static, then each time you RDP in, the actual IP address a.b.c.d may have changed again. To get around that, you would need to set up a dynamic DNS service. Google for dynDNS or no-ip, these are free to set up & use, and they allow you to set a domain name like www.tingu669_homeLAN.no-ip.org which will always point to your current puiblic IP. Once you have that, you use the domain name instead of the hard-coded ip address when making RDP connections form outwith your own LAN.


you shouldn't need anything extra on the PC for the current scenario - the fact that you can connect OK within your own LAN shows that the PC setup is fine. However, the reason others use ssh or vpn is because these are secure - unlike your current setup. Currently, assuming the only issue you have is that you've not been using your public IP, your home PC is sitting there with the default RDP port wide open and only very basic security (I'm assuming you have a user/password login?). This is an open invitation to every port-scanner out there to have a go at cracking your PC. As a minimum, you need to
(a) reenable your PC firewall (unless you already have a good one running directly on your router?);
(b) ensure that your password is lengthy & arcane.
(c) reconfigure your router and PC so that you no longer use the default port - switch to a random one somewhere above 10000 that is not otherwise in use.

For any serious ongoing use of RDP, you should look into running openssh or openvpn on the host PC and the corresponding client (from the repos) on n900 so that your sessions are fully encrypted. Ideally, those sessions should use PKI so that password security isn't an issue. Setting up PKI (public key encryption) takes a half hour of reading and probably another hour to set up and test, but after it's done it's done and you end up with a more secure connection without the need for password entry to slow you down.


HTH

a huge thanks to u Pigro. as u said, the real ipwas my problem. ive tried it now with my public ip, and Buyaka! i'm in! thanks again.

ok, now i will look into no-ip or dynDNS. which would u suggest?

if i install openssh on my n900, then do i remove Rdesktop? does openssh have a gui? a search in the app manager for openssh returns 4 results: keychain, openssh client, openssh clien and server, openssh server. which do i need?

thanx

I think they're both perfectly good. I use no-ip myself & very happy with it.

no, openssh simply allows you to set up a secure tunnel over the internet on a port of your choice (so, protecting you from dodgy public wifi sniffers, allowing you to circumvent troublesome corporate firewalls/proxies etc.). Once you have established the tunnel on your chosen local port on your phone back to the port on your home PC on which RDP is listening, you simply connect RDP on the phone to the local port - your RDP client traffic then just scoots down the encrypted tunnel to your home PC. See http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=365 for an example of setting up an ssh tunnel - though there are probably many better, simpler, guides on TMO if you do a power search :-)

no, openssh has no gui, it's a command line tool. For your use case (remotely controlling a home PC from your phone) you'd just need to install openssh client. If you want a GUI based solution, your best bet would be openvpn. That also requires to be set up from a command prompt (and it's arguably more complicated to do so) but once setup, it has a dinky status bar applet so that you can connecrt to home from 3G/public wifi simply by tapping the status bar, hitting the openvpn icon, and choosing your home PC.

As well as being simpler, it has several other fringe benefits: you can address all kit on your internal LAN on their INTERNAL IP's; there's no need to open lots of ports on your home firewall as you are "inside" the firewall for the duration of your connection; also, if you configure appropriately you can route ALL your traffic (not just RDP) via your home connection - eg. internet browsing. See here http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=960543 for some light reading :-)

hi, thanx once again Pigro. iv set up my domain. all good so far. my next question is how to bring sound over from pc to n900?

anybody?

i want to control my desktop with my pc too.and observe what is happeing on my desktop when i am not around. i hav windows xp and i use broadband internet connection with no router access.i use gsm to browse in my N900. can u guide me in using vnc or teamviewer?

can anyone plz help

hi. ive never used vnc or the other u mentioned, but i use Rdesktop which is just fine. for this u just simply install Rdesktop and rdesktop-cli from app manager.

launch it and enter this info:

server = your public ip (go to www.whatsmyip.net on the computer u want to remotely manage, this will show you the public IP address assigned to your computer by your home ISP.)

username = account u use to log in to your computer with

password = and password for this account.

thats it! u done

*ps- make sure you comp is set up to allow remote connections. this is quite a simple process. 5mins to set up or less. instructions are found very easily on google or microsoft website. i think they are also in this thread somewhere. do a power search.

HTH

thanks a lot for ur reply but do i need to have the same wifi connection for both my pc and N900? i already mentioned that i browse my net in N900 with the gsm network( i mean data plan) and i use broadband in my pc. is it still possible? can i use it when m not in my home? what does it require to run?