Remote Desktop to your Home computer

Alot of people I know ask me how to connect to their home system from remote locations (work, friends house, on travel). Here are a couple useful links to get started. You only need to open port 3389 over TCP.

How to install Remote Desktop sharing in XP

Forum article on Remote Desktops

Windows Client - search Microsofts site for RDP Client if the link is broken

Macintosh Client - Macintosh OS X

Linux Client - best to get through YaST (rdesktop and tsclient).

Web Client - Must be setup on your web server.

By default you can only access one machine behind a Linksys firewall this way. Since all the machines share a single address externally. To get around this you need to setup one of the XP machines to run on a different port. This can be done by following the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 306759 which details How to Change the Listening Port for Remote Desktop. You can also do this on the server version with Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 187623. Looks like its the same registry key for XP and Server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpPortNumber

NOTE: When you try to connect to this computer by using the Remote Desktop connection, you must type the new port. So say you change it to 3390 (3389 + 1), you just forward that port to the 2nd box. Then when you connect you add 3390 to the end. Not sure if you use a space, or a myhost.mydomain.com:3390

UPDATE: Windows XP SP2 Built-in firewall automatically opens up port 3389 when you enable remote desktop, but if you go and change the port, this new port will be blocked. Be sure to add a rule to allow your machine to receive connections on what ever port you change this to.