Accessing a server behind a firewall

Chowdry, Mamoon Mamoon_Chowdry "at" adc.com
Tue, 11 Apr 2000 22:38:50 +0000


Hi,

I'm writing to both help others who may want to do the what I am doing and also to ask if there's a more elegant solution. I have been trying to access my office PC (which is behind a firewall), from a PC on the internet. 

My current solution is:
My office PC has a VNC server running as a service. Every hour I have a scheduled task that runs "winvnc -connect <HOME_IP_ADDRESS>". On my home PC I have the VNC client running in listen mode.

This is the only way I can "dial in" to the office as the firewall only allows outgoing TCP connections.

The problems with this are:
Every time the scheduled task runs, it pops up a new window. If I try to set the server to only use DISPLAY 0, the connections seem to be queued. If I kill  one, the next one pops up straight away. If this goes on for long enough, without me cycling through queued pending connections, the server appears to freeze. I am using WIN98 at both ends. 

Is there anyway I can trigger the server PC to initiate a VNC session on demand, instead of on a regular basis?

I was thinking of having a secure tunnel set up by the server PC via which I can reverse-telnet from the client to the server (I have a telnet daemon on the server PC which I can use to run the bat file). This would be like the rpimp utility for Linux, but I can't find a DOS equivalent. Can this be done with SSH? 

Hope you guys can help,

Mamoon.
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