in message
I'm on Verizon's FIOS.
My daughter, 100+ miles away, is Verizon's "Broadband" (seems tb
DSL).
My guess that in both cases the IP address of the PC is dynamic -
i.e. it can change from logon-to-logon, or even from
hour-to-hour.
I VPN to various client sites every day - but I'm hooking into
their VPN servers.
Is there any hope of me being able to create a Remote Desktop
Connection to her PC in order to troubleshoot some email issues?
You and your daughter are using dynamically assigned IP addresses.
That means they can change. If you use dial-up, they change everytime
you dial in. If you use an always-on connection, like DSL or cable,
they can change when they expire (all dynamic IP address have an
expiration). With the always-on connection, often you get reassigned
the same IP address but that is not guaranteed.
So the problem with using Remote Desktop or some flavor of VNC is that
you would have to know the other host's IP at the time you tried to
connect to it, and that IP address might be different tomorrow. You
need something that monitors the IP address of the remote host and
provides an IP *name* to which you connect which then resolves to the
current IP address of the remote host. Look into:
DynDNS.com
No-IP.com
Some NAT routers, for example, try to provide support for, say, DynDNS
to act as their client (what monitors the IP address) but there are a
couple problems with that setup. One, the IP address being reported
is the WAN-side IP address of the router, not of any intranet host
connected to it. That means you have to use port forwarding in the
router so when you connect to the router on that port then the traffic
goes to a specific intranet host. Two, I've found routers are a bit
flaky when acting as the DynDNS client. Often they only report the
WAN-side IP address of the router when it changes. For cable or DSL
connections, the IP address may not change for months. That is, each
time the dynamic IP address has expired, the new one happens to be the
same as the previous one so there is no change. Since there is no
change, the router doesn't report anything back to DynDNS. However,
free accounts at DynDNS will expire after so many weeks of being idle.
You'll end up getting e-mails telling you your DynDNS account is about
to expire (or the IP name lookup you define with them will expire).
If you don't access your DynDNS account in a few days, poof, you lose
the IP name redirect or the account. I believe No-IP is the same way.
Even if the IP address doesn't change, it is still a good idea to have
the client access your DynDNS account to keep it alive. Because of
these 2 problems, I instead choose to run their client program on the
host to which I want to connect remotely. It does the reporting back
to DynDNS and does it frequently enough to keep alive your account or
IP redirect, plus I don't need to do any port forwarding in the
router. The client only consumes 4.5MB of memory (0.8MB real + 3.9MB
virtual).
Once you define a IP name at DynDNS, you use that IP *name* to
identify the remote host in Remote Desktop or VNC. If the remote
host's IP address changes, the DynDNS client running on that remote
host will report it to DynDNS which will update the IP redirect so the
IP name is still valid (i.e., it continues to point at the remote host
despite the dynamic IP address change). When you connect using the IP
name, the DNS resolution passes through your DNS server (because it
isn't defined there) to pass it upstream to the next DNS server, and
so on, until it gets the lookup from DynDNS' nameserver which returns
the IP address for the remote host identified by that IP name.
Your daughter doesn't have to do anything to open and maintain a
DynDNS account. You would do that. At DynDNS, and after creating an
account with them (free), you want to define you want to define a
hostname. You create something like <hostname>.<domain> (e.g.,
glendacresswell.dyndns.org). They have several domains to chose from,
and you get to pick the username (as long as it isn't already used for
the domain that you selected. However, your daughter will have to
install the DynDNS client program on her host. In that client
program, she will have to specify that she will be updated the
glendacresswell.dyndns.org IP name that you defined in the account at
DynDNS. Obviously you don't want just anyone changing that definition
so the DynDNS client logins to your DynDNS account using whatever
login credentials are valid for your account. You'll have to give
those (username and password) to your daughter.
Using DynDNS or No-IP isn't super complicated but it does require
defining a hostname in your account and installing their client along
with configuring it to login to your account and to specify the same
hostname as you defined in your account. A simpler method is
GoToMyPC.com but it costs money. Yeah, they say "try it free" but
that's just hiding that it is 30-day trialware. It costs $20/month
with a discount if you prepay for a year contract. I don't think it
does anything more than DynDNS or No-IP except provide wizards to do
the setup (which can probably all be done from the client end rather
than defining the IP redirect in your account and then making the
client match up).
