Help with remote assistant

[darius]

I want to use remote assistant to set up some stuff on my brother's PC
remotely. I sent him this

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/remotea
ssist/viafile.mspx

and instructed him to send an a remote assistant request. When I ran the
file I got "cannot resolve host name", so I opened it up in notepad (it's
a text file) and saw this

.... RCTICKET="65538,1,192.168.1.102 ...

obviously he's behind a router. Can remote assistant work if he's behind
a router? What do I/he need to do? thanks

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

When the request is made via e-mail, and the sender is behind the router, they must edit the invitation before sending to show the router's actual IP address, not their IP address on the LAN.

 

[darius]

When the request is made via e-mail, and the sender is behind the
router, they must edit the invitation before sending to show the
router's actual IP address, not their IP address on the LAN.

strange, I just tried to send an invite from my computer (I'm also behind
a router), and my invite shows this

RCTICKET="65538,1,<my-router's-IP>:62413;192.168.0.102:3389;...

so I inserted <his-router's-IP>:62413 into his invite but I still got
cannot resolve hostname.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

This happens when you send the invitation by e-mail. Messenger has no way of knowing what the "public" IP address is. And if you edit the IP address of the invitation, you have to ensure that the IP address didn't change. Using Messenger to send the invitation directly is the most reliable method of getting an invite through when one or both of you are behind a router.