Friday, January 24, 2014

Remote Desktop Support With VNC

VNC is a well-known tool for remote desktop view and control. The two computers establish a TCP connection so that one of them can access the display of the other. However, almost always these two computers are behind a firewall/router and do not have a real IP to be accessed from the Internet. In such a case one of them can do port forwarding on the router/firewall and this would allow the connection to be established. The problem is that more often than not, none of the parts that want to establish such a remote connection have access to the firewall that separates/protects it from the real internet. Sometimes it can even be several levels deep behind the firewall (several layers of firewalls). However, if you have access to an external server (for example a server in the cloud) there is still a workaround and things can be fixed to work. Here I will explain the tricks and hacks that can be used in such a case in order to establish a secure connection to a remote desktop.