trying to find a remote access alternative

S

steven1110

Limp Gawd
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Aug 12, 2004
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I have a friend being shipped off overseas in a couple months and he’s wanting to tap into my media server while over there. I’m running WHS on my server, Vista32 ultimate on my htpc, and he has Vista64 home premium on his laptop. I saw that Vista home isn’t capable to remotely accessing with WHS so I’m wondering if there is another way around this.

I don’t have any experience with this sort of thing so I did a bit of reading and was wondering if maybe a DDNS would be the route to go?

Any help is appreciated. And since I don’t have much experience with the type of computing if you could post articles that explain how to setup your suggestions.

Thanks!

Steven
 
Dynamic DNS address is a good start. You could have it open where he could just remote into that name, or set up a VPN connection on your server for him to connect to. There are a number of free VPN solutions like OpenVPN:

http://www.openvpn.org/

That will give you a tunneled connection (someone else can go into detail on the security), and he can access your network resources like he was connected to your network locally.
 
I did run across VPN also but it seemed a bit more confusing the DDNS. However, I have read good things about Hamachi VPN so I'll probably look into that too.
 
You could take the Remote Desktop Client approach, open/foward ports, or deal with VPN, and deal with tracking your WAN IP via methods such as DynDNS.

Or..keep it easy...LogMeIn free. Absolutely ZERO worry about tracking the IP, or firewalls, or ports, or..or...

..it's just simple, and secure..log into a website that never changes...logmein.com
Sign in, and sign into the computer. Done. //phew
 
Ok I'm liking how logmein is looking. One question though, I don't want the remote computer to have access to all of my data on the server, just the video shared folder.

Would it be possible to setup logmein so my friend only has access to certain folders or is it a total control or nothing?

Maybe I'll install it on my htpc this weekend and take it for a quick run with laptop.
 
You can remotely access WHS with any client (Vista Home Premium or otherwise)

but you can't access Vista Home Premium remotely.
 
vischo said:
You can remotely access WHS with any client (Vista Home Premium or otherwise)

but you can't access Vista Home Premium remotely.
Click to expand...

hmmm...ok...I must have misunderstood their website then. I'll give it a shot this weekend too. thanks for the heads up.
 
For personal use Teamviewer is free. There are no ports to be opened and it works great. Link
 
Ok updates.

I tried to setup WHS remote access but I can't seem to get upnp going or the ports opened correctly...I guess verizon has it's dsl blocking port 80 and I don't feel like paying a premium for it either.

I did get teamviewer running but the only downfall was the file transfer rate. It was bouncing between 50-90kb/s so needless to say it's a bit slow.

Logmein look to be just a paid service so I'd rather not go that route and I haven't tried VPN or DDNS yet.

Just was curious on what route might give the best transfer rates and best results. Thanks for your help so far!
 
What is your upload rate? That is going to be the biggest drawback for doing media from your server.
 
What kind of media is he going to be viewing? With that upload (even though that is decent for a home connection) it might be tough to stream video well.
 
yeah now that I tested the upload I know it's not going to matter too much since he was hitting max uploads at the peaks so teamviewer is as good as any probably.

We did try to stream it as well through teamviewer and it was really jittery he said and the colors were off too. He said they looked like a photo negatives so I'm going to guess it's just not getting enough data quickly enough.

Thx for all of your help guys.
 
yup not gonna work for what you want, easiest thing to do is setup ftp or something, let him download the files when needed.
 
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