Remote Access?

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Logmein,

It should work with your router. And there's a free version, less some advanced control you might not need. It's the best of the bunch.

Cheers

Use a service like

DDNS will let you get by the IP address, the Router's firewall can be configured to allow the (one) PC you want to access to be able to receive the ports.

I've done this in the past (I do have fixed IP, but DDNS does solve that issue) and it worked.

I use Logmein Hamachi to access home from my netbook. It's installed in a folder on my encrypted drive (Truecrypt) to keep anyone who might find or steal the netbook from accessing my home. Yet I can't seem to find exactly where it keeps it's hashed key for the VPN. I wish the thing prompted for a password before opening the connection.

Another possible solution would be to use a PogoPlug. The home page acts as a DNS server (the Pogoplug pings their server and relays its IP), so all you have to do is access your passworded account from their home page and the PogoPlug will serve up whatever you have on your drives if you network them properly.

What are the differences between LogMeIn Hamachi and LogMeIn Free? ...Jim Thompson

Have a look at openvpn. I use it exactly for what you want other than I have a static IP. But I'm pretty sure openvpn can handle dynamic ip. I have several clients that use it for employee/consultant access.

Joe Chisolm

Jim Thompson Inscribed thus:

Try "no-ip.com" !

Get your own domain name, and register it with DynDNS. Your router should have a dynamic DNS client in it, or you can use ddclient or whatever the Windows equivalent is. Now you have a public Internet presence.

Then use port forwarding (another router setting) to connect whatever remote access software you use to the outside world. Since my stuff is mostly Linux, I just use X tunnelled via ssh, i.e. from a Windows client I use Putty for command line and X applications, and Expandrive for secure drive sharing. (It's nicer from a Linux client, but that's because I'm a command line sort of guy.)

I forward ssh from each machine on my network to a different port on the WAN side, so I can just go

ssh -Y -p xxxxx mydomain.com

and get to any machine I want by using the right value of xxxxx. (None of them is forwarded to port 22.)

You can also use a free DynDNS account, but they give you a cheesy domain name. For $20 a year or whatever it is, I'd rather have a more congenial name.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Just one big difference. Hamachi is a VPN, so you can do all network functions, and the 'free' is only remote control.

I dunno... no one's going to know, right? And he could have "jimthompson.is-a-geek.com" or "jimthompson.kicks-ass.net" 100% for free!

Therefore, my complaint about Hamachi doesn't apply to the 'free'.

Whatever DDNS service he uses, he'd better make sure that router will update the IP regularly. Some routers do a terrible job at this, and in those cases it's always good to keep the client updating software running on a machine that is on 24/7.

For ease of use, I'd use Logmein Hamachi for the VPN connection.

Sno-o-o-o-ort!

I'll have to ponder that.

(In a fit of pique I DID register liberalsaredummies.com the other day :-) ...Jim Thompson

Agreed - OpenVPN with suitable security certs can work very well indeed.

Since your home system is assigned a dynamic IP address, you may want to use a service such as dyndns.org - this will let you refer to your home-network gateway/router via a domain name which you can "re-point" rapidly if your ISP forces your router over to a different dynamic IP address.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Hamachi has a VPN. It depends upon what you need to do. Do you need access to files and such or just remote control? The 'Free' is remote conntrol. There is a 'Pro' version that will allow transfering files. And then Hamachi, which I found over kill. We use the Pro version for serviceing clients. It'll connect as long as the customer has internet access, eliminating router issues.

For the office I have OpenVPN setup, and tightVNC. But it requires a good knowledge of networking to get working.

Cheers

I know from nothing about networks. Mainly what I want to do is read and reply to E-mail; though I might want to run PSpice at some point in time. ...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I've occasionally wished that there were a Usenet (NNTP) reader that would automatically synchronize across multiple computers. AFAIK, though, no such program exists, unfortunately.

---Joel

Indeed! ...Jim Thompson