I'll answer your questions (to the best of my ability) in-line.... -----Original Message----- From: BPS [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 9:51 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Configuring a router...
Hi! Can anyone help me with very, very basic router configuration instructions, please? Q1: First question is: how can I tell if I have a dynamic or static IP address? A1: Almost definitely a dynamic IP, unless you specifically asked for (and are probably paying for) a static IP. An easy way to tell -- visit somewhere like http://www.whatismyip.com and note the IP address. Then, turn off your modem and router for a few hours and then turn 'em back on and revisit that site. You may or may not have received a new IP address. If all else fails, call your internet provider and ask. Q2: Second, I want to be able to use both VNC and pcAnywhere. Symantec has posted the following instructions for configuring a NetGear router: "In the Port Forwarding screen, enter ports 5631 and 5632. Add the local IP address where you want these ports to forward to (for example, 192.168.0.3)." Two questions about this - will those ports also be compatible with VNC? A2: No. You need to forward DIFFERENT ports for VNC. I am pretty sure that if you try to listen on the same ports you'll get a conflict. VNC is not encrypted, so it might be better to use some sort of encrypted tunnel as well to run VNC over. I am connecting from Windows 2000 Pro to a linux box at home and I use PuTTY to create an SSH tunnel. There are various FAQs on how to do that. Whether you're using Windows on both ends or Windows and some other O/S on the other, it will require different tools to create an encrypted tunnel. That being said, if you don't care if someone is "sniffing" your session, you can just forward port 5900 in your router. Q3: Secondly, how do I determine what local IP address I want those ports forwarded to? A3: Well, what's the "internal" IP address of the machine(s) you wish to connect to? If you're using dynamic IPs inside the router, that could be problematic when arranging port forwarding. I'm not familiar enough with the Netgear routers to know if they support forwarding based on MAC address or not. It might be easiest to just assign each PC you want to control behind the router a static IP address (i.e. 192.168.1.x or 10.x.x.x or whatever...) and just port-forward appropriately. If you need to control multiple machines behind a router, what you can do is forward port 5900 to one machine's port 5900, port 5901 to a second machine's port 5900 and so on. Since VNC (on Windows machines) just displays what's shown on the local screen, you really only have one session (although you *can* share that with other users -- it just slows things WAAAAAYYY down!) If you're using some other operating system (Unix-based, such as Linux, *BSD, Mac OS/X, etc) you have the potential for a lot more "desktops." I'm not real familiar with "Real" VNC, as I use a variant release called TightVNC and in that release, unix desktops do not display the local console, they start a separate session that is not displayed on the local console, much like the old VT terminals would all connect back to one box. I hope I answered your questions. A lot of what you want to know is in the faq at http://faq.gotomyvnc.com John Aldrich _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To remove yourself from the list visit: http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
