Remote control over the Internet using Radmin

[astrolabe]

Hi

I've an intersting problem - Two PCs one in Devon one in Essex (mine). I want to be able to help the other user and teach him how to operate the beast.

We are on different ISPs (Pipex and Wanadoo). I can't get any joy out of his end at all. I know he has a dynamic IP so he gives me his and you'd think I should be able to at least "ping" it. Not a hope.

Anyone any ideas

Tom

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Is he running a firewall? If so, and he should be, has it disabled those ports?

I know Zone Alarm is defaulting to discard ping requests, maybe his does too?

 

[astrolabe]

Funny you should say that - we both use Zone Alarm (ZA) - I set that up before I let him loose.

However I got him to down ZA temporarily to overcomethat problem. Still no joy. Which port does ping default to use.

Radmin uses 4899 but that is irrelevant as we haven't got that far yet.

 

[Nodsu]

Ping does not use any ports - it works on top of ICMP and not TCP or UDP. Many firewalls block ping requests and some deny even ping replies or all ICMP traffic.

Traceroute is a good utility to see at which point the ping gets blocked. "tracert" in Windows.

 

[tdeg]

I use Putty and VNC.

There are alot of websites that show you how to set it up.

You don't need to ping to be able to use it, the firewalls just need to allow the traffic for both through. Its easy to do in ZoneAlarm, just click accept and remember when it pops up.

 

[Nodsu]

You don't need ping to use radmin either.

Of course setting up a SSH server and tunneling VNC through it, adding two programs that are useless for the original purpose and inrease the complexity of the setup, is much more superior to just using one program with more features than your vanilla VNC..

 

[tdeg]

What feature does radmin give that VNC doesn't?

If you get a newer release of VNC like UltraVNC it supports filetransfer and even remote chat with the user of the PC.

Plus its free. I like free as opposed to $35 a license.

 

[Nodsu]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=vanilla

And UltraVNC is not a "newer" release of VNC - it is a Windows-only branch of the RealVNC

And even UltraVNC lacks native encryption.

 

[astrolabe]

Oh the plot thickens - apparently his ISP has given him a wireless DSL Modem running off his internet port. So do I presume this has an IP address - which is what I was pinging and the computer has a local IP address?

Unfortunately ISP has a lousy support line and getting anyone to talk sensibly about this is proving v. difficult

 

[Nodsu]

Well, local IP ranges are known.. They start with 192.168 10. or 172.

Since that "DSL modem" thing is wireless then it is pretty ertain we are talking about a router here. Your friend needs to configure that thing to accept pings and Radmin connections.

3.0 beta of Radmin supports reverse connections. So if your friend cannot get his machine to listen for connections then you can set up your client side to accept requests from Radmin servers.

 

[tdeg]

Encryption?

That's why you tunnel it through PuTTY...

And yes the version of VNC that UlraVNC is probably the same as other VNC client/servers, but the added features are new. (ie... file transfer and chat.)

What your friend will need to do is set up port forwarding so that you can connect through the wireless to it.

 

[Nodsu]

Yes, and that's why tunneled VNC is cumbersome: you have to set up a SSH server and use a SSH client - things that are not needed for the original purpose of remote desktop control.

 

[tdeg]

True enough on a Windows machine.

I've been using Linux alot at home lately and I guess I just take the remote access parts of the os for granted.

On the linux box I just start the ssh server automatically and its ready to go. I am going to see how hard it is to set up on Windows... may be a project for next week.