Using VNC to access remote desktop across the web

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Wednesday 21 April 2004 20:04, Jerome R. Westrick wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 11:36, Alex Mattelaer wrote:
> > I am trying to work out how I could use VNC to access my customer's
> > desktop PC across the public internet - their firewall / network policy
> > doesn't allow them to (easily) expose an internal IP address to the web
> > so I can't simply ask him to run VNC server on his machine - is there any
> > way in which he could initiate a connection from his desktop to VNC
> > (proxy?) on my web server and thereby allow me to "pass through" when
> > connecting from my PC to the web server ?
>
> If your firewall/network policy allows for you to to expose internal IP
> addresses, then you can put a viewer into "Listen-mode", and have your
> client "add-connection".
>
> This is a connection initialed from the server to the client built
> explicitly for this purpose...

I frequently do this to support remote clients anyway, since it is frequenly 
easier to explain, particularly if 'you' (ie, the person offering support) 
has a DNS entry that they can point at their ip address.  (A dynamic DNS 
entry if fine.)

You then get your client to start the server, and tell then to right-click the 
vnc icon in the system try and add a client with url 
supporthost.your.domainname.  In fact it should not be hard to write a batch 
file to automate this.

Often this is easier than getting them to work out what their ip address is 
(particularly if the have a DSL router or some such) so you can connect to 
it.  And it is generally firewall friendly, unless their firewall also 
restricts outgoing connections to specific ports.

Cheers,

Rasjid.