A slightly general VNC question

[Robin Hill]

On Wed Aug 27, 2008 at 03:34:15PM -0700, Shikhanshu Agarwal wrote:

> hello,
> 
> situation:
> i am a mac os x (leopard) user. at my home, i have a single ip address from
> the isp distributed amongst me and my roomates through a belkin wireless
> router.
> 
> what i want:
> i want to access/control my mac from my workplace using vnc.
> 
> what i did:
> to do what i want to do, i created a vnc server on the mac, and forwarded
> the server port from my internal ip address to the router's (external) ip
> address so that i can communicate with the port from outside the home lan
> 
Technically the forwarding is done in the other direction (from the
external IP to the internal).

> what happened:
> within the lan, everything's rosy, i can access my mac from roomy's PC using
> a viewer. also, usually i go to http://ip-address:port in the browser and if
> it i see the RFB 003.008 message, i assume communication is fine.
> from office, it looks like port forwarding is working fine.
> http://my-external-ip:forwarded_port works fine and gives me RFB 003.008 in
> the browser. thus i am assuming the communication is fine and my requests
> from outside the lan are being properly forwarded to the vnc server port
> (5900) on my mac.
> 
Okay, that all sounds like it's working.

> the problem:
> vnc viewer from office wont connect! though browser shows the protocol
> version message, vnc viewer is not able to find the server. ALSO! ping
> <external_ip> doesnt work but http://external-ip works (takes me to the
> router setup page obviously).
> 
> question:
> why could the ping not be working? if the office network was "blocking" my
> outgoing requests, wouldn't http://external-ip:port give a failed connection
> too? why does it give rfb message? i guess if the ping problem is solved,
> vnc viewer should work.
> and suppose, there IS some kind of blocking going on, is using a proxy the
> solution to be able to ping my router? if it is, how can i do that? if not,
> is there any other way?
> 
I'd ignore the ping issue - there's probably another option somewhere in
the router config to enable responding to pings.

I don't see why VNC wouldn't work though - you're obviously getting
through to the server okay via the web browser.  Have you tried both
'external-ip:port' and 'external-ip::port' (different clients handle
port addressing in different ways)?  What VNC client (name & version)
are you using?

Cheers,
    Robin
-- 
     ___        
    ( ' }     |       Robin Hill        <robin "at" robinhill.me.uk> |
   / / )      | Little Jim says ....                            |
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