From virtualisation to remote access

It's been a while since I last blogged anything, and, being a techie, you won't be surprised to find out that i've been playing around with a few things.

If you're a techie like me, you'll appreciate the whole raft of "technical support requests" that come in from various friends and family members... "martin, can you have a look at this vista laptop" or "chadders, can you sort out the display drivers on this ubuntu machine". Now, don't get me wrong, i'm more than willing to help them out, I know they'd help me out if I needed it, but since I'm really the only person in my circle of friends and family that has more than a modicum of IT experience, it's naturally me they ask if they need anything beyond the "how do you do this in Word?" variety.

The only trouble is that some of them live quite a distance away, and sometimes it would simply take all my time to drive to their houses (frankly, it's usually impossible to explain how to sort things over the phone with me, i'm definitely a "hands-on" kind of guy.....). So, internally, I run a combination of Windows XP Home, Ubuntu Linux and Damn Small Linux on various machines (plus a myriad of other OSes using VMs, of course, as outlined in a earlier blog), all networked using a Netgear DG834GT router / ADSL modem, and, crucially, I access them all pretty much remotely using a combination of TightVNC (for the XP Home machine which doesn't support "standard" Remote Desktop (RDP)) and Remote Desktop (RDP).

So, after a recent request for some Microsoft Windows Vista support at my brother-in-laws, I decided to look into educating them into allowing me remote access to their machines.

Now, on an internal network, it's one thing, over the internet, it's slightly more involved. Let's take the Vista case study. Firstly, you have to setup port-forwarding on the router (if it supports it.. most modern ones do). This is so your router's external IP address (and relevant port) will automatically shunt traffic onto the machine which sits behind the router, in this case, the Vista machine. This was relatively easy to do once I'd instructed him how to
access the router admin page. Note, that I actually installed TightVNC on Vista for this to work, for no other reason other than I like the web interface that it offers, there's no reason why I couldn't use RDP (except on XP Home). Once the windows firewall had had port 5800 and 5900 enabled (these are the two default ports that TightVNC uses), simply entering into a java enabled browser (firefox, in my case), http://ip_address:5800/, enter the defined password and bang, I'm in, with his desktop in my browser. Brilliant, now it means I can do most things from here, rather than going to his house.