One thing that I love about all the new windows products is the remote
desktop features. I previously used PCAnywhere but I find that remote
desktop is now almost as good, would like to see a file transfer like
PCAnywhere has, but remote desktop is free so that is a plus for it. One
of the tasks that I face with my network setup is forwarding ports through
my router. There are two issues that I came across when dealing with the
RDP forwarding. The first was what is the port number of RDP. With a quick
search on Google I found that the standard RDP port is 3389. Now that you
have the port number you can simply go into your router and forward that
port through and after enabling your remote desktop feature it will work
from outside your network as long as you either know your IP address or
have a dynamic dns service like I use. To enable remote desktop in Windows
XP and Windows 2003 go to the start menu, find the my computer icon and
right click on it. Select the properties option in the drop down list and
then click on the remote tag in the window that appears. There you will
see the two check boxes, check the second box, and then click on the
remote user button. Make sure that the users you want to have access are
in the list and then click ok until you have exitted all of the windows.
RDP is now enabled on your machine. So this simple setup would have worked
for my network but the issue then became I have several servers that I
want access to along with my desktop. Now I could just remote to my
desktop and then remote to the other machines from there since they are
all on the local network. This would create a lot of data that needed to
be transferred though, with limited upstream speeds on your broadband
connection you don't want this, and will cause performance issues with RDP.
So I had two options, I could change the registry entry like was stated in
the article. I will paste that fix here just in case that page has an
issue at some point:
**** WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause
serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating
system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that
result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at
your own risk. You can use the Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP
Professional to connect to your computer from another, remote computer.
WARNING: The Remote Assistance feature in Windows XP may not work
properly if you change the listening port. To change the port that
Remote Desktop listens on: Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe). Locate
the following key in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControl SetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpPortNumber
On the Edit menu, click Modify, click Decimal, type the new port number,
and then click OK. Quit Registry Editor. NOTE: When you try to connect
to this computer by using the Remote Desktop connection, you must type
the new port. Keywords: kbhowto kbnetwork KB306759 Technology:
kbrdcMac100 kbrdcsearch kbrdcWin100 kbWinXPPro kbWinXPPro64bit
kbWinXPProSearch kbWinXPSearch kbZNotKeyword *****
The other option I had was to go into my router and specify another
external port number and then point that port to the 3398 on the IP
address of the machine I wanted to go to. I chose this second option as it
was less time consuming and did the trick for me. One appealing thing
about the ability to change the port number of RDP is security. If you
leave the standard port number then anyone will know to check that port to
see if you have Remote Desktop enabled and potentially compromise your
network. Let me know if there are any issues with the registry fix though
and if there are I will just remove it from this article.
