# Remote Desktop and linksys wrt54g router



## pacetbird (Aug 16, 2004)

Perhaps someone can help me. I have look through other threads here, but none seem to be directly helpful.

I have two machines running XP Pro. One is a wireless laptop and the other a desktop. At home, I use a linksys wrt54g router to network them and for internet access (Comcast cable). My network works fine, and when I am at home I can successfully use the local ip 192.168.x.xxx for Remote Desktop Connection.

What I would like to do is use Remote Desktop on my laptop when I am at school to my desktop at home. I try to use the same 192.168.x.xxx of my desktop from my laptop at school and it doesn't work. Also, I have tried www.whatismyip.com but I understand that that only gives me my router address. When I type in this address I get the same problem. So, what IP address do I use for RDC? Also, do I need to enable anything on the router? I have look through the router settings and can't seem to find anything relevant to this. Also, I have disabled Norton Internet Security while I am trying to get this to work.

Any thoughts?


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

You need for forward some ports in the router to the machine you wish to contact externally. I did a search in Google, and turned up this post that seems to address your issue:

If you're using Windows XP Professional and you do work on both your home and your office computers, Remote Desktop can be a lifesaver - it's not unknown for me to be working on documentation at home and forget to connect to work to save the file on my office computer, for example. Remote Desktop to the rescue - since I leave my primary home machine on 24x7 and it's connected via DSL, I just remote into the home box and grab the necessary files. No fuss, no muss, and I have it here in time to hand off to the team for review.

However, what if, like my household, you have multiple machines, all of which need to be directly accessible via Remote Desktop from an external location, and you only have one IP address that points to your router? Since Remote Desktop by default looks at port 3389, you can't exactly set up port forwarding to point that single port to all of your machines.

There is an answer, or rather, two answers. Both of them are detailed in Microsoft Knowledge Base articles.

The first one is this:

Configuring the Remote Desktop Client to Connect to a Specific Port - this tells you how to get your client machine (in this case, the one you're on at work) to talk to a different Remote Desktop port than the default. In some cases, this plus a little configuration on your home router may be all you need. If your router's port forwarding option allows you to configure a public port plus a private port for each computer, all you need to do is set a different public port for each of the computers you want to access, and set the private port for each to 3389.

But what if your router doesn't expose a private port as well as a public port? No problem. That's where this article comes into play: How to Change the Listening Port for Remote Desktop (caution! This involves registry editing, and is only recommended for experienced users!). What you'll be doing is changing each of your home machines to listen to a different port for Remote Desktop connection requests. Then configure your home router with the same port numbers forwarded to the appropriate machine (So if Machine X is listening for Remote Desktop connections on port 2222, port 2222 is forwarded to Machine X on the router).


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## cruze5 (Aug 25, 2004)

are you wanting to just access files or "work" on your computer at home? if you just want to access files either set up and ftp server or use DMZ. and make sure you setup passwords on the folders you share


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## pacetbird (Aug 16, 2004)

Thanks everyone! I got the port forwarding to work. Plus, I found out that my work wireless network was blocking the ports for RDC. They fixed the problem!


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