It would really help our business to be able to remotely control a computer of ours. I’m somewhat techy, and my business partner is even more techy, and we can’t figure out how to use either of these open source programs.
The YouTube videos we find keep controlling computers on the home network in someone’s house. You CAN use this through the internet, right?I’ve forwarded the port used in TightVNC from the router to the computer I want to control. I put in the IP address that www.ipchicken.com gives me for that computer, but the TightVNC viewer still won’t connect to that computer.
Can someone give me a list of things to make sure I’ve done to get this working?
Is the VNC server running on the host machine?
I would try getting it to run on the local network where the machine is running first. Then try to go out across the net. That way you eliminate any firewall and port forwarding problems and just concentrate on getting the VNC server and clients working first.
You are probably going to need to forward more than one port. VNC uses ports in the range of 58xx and 59xx. You may need to forward both of those port ranges (i.e. everything from 5800 to 5999). If you are only running one server and one client you’ll probably only end up using ports 5800 and 5900. A listening mode server also uses port 5500.
ETA: You might also want to run wireshark on the host (once you get the VNC working locally) just to make sure you actually are getting packets from the remote client. There may be some additional port filtering going on at the ISP level or somewhere else that you aren’t aware of.
What kind of machine are you trying to connect to? Windows? is the firewall off or otherwise configured to let the TCP port you configured for VNC through?
Who is your internet service provider? Do you know if they allow transient TCP connections from the internet? Some ISPs block TCP ports. My ISP doesn’t block conventionally encrypted protocol ports (e.g. 443 (HTTPS), 22 (SSH), 3389 (RDP)).
Have you verified that you can connect to the machine from within your office network to set aside the internet aspect?