Up until a few days ago, I could use Tight VNC (or Ultra VNC) to remote into my Win XP Pro PC at home from my work PC. I flashed the firmware on my WRT54GL router (went back to Linksys firmware for a little while, but flashed back to Tomato 1.15), and now I cannot access my home PC from work anymore. I use No-IP, and it has always worked fine. Checked my settings in Tomato, but wasn't sure if I was missing something. Not sure if anything got changed when I reflashed, or whether I will need to change something from a default setting. Any recommendations?
Anytime you flash different firmware (different source), you should do a hard reset both before and after flashing. You cannot be sure the NVRAM settings will be compatible across different sources.
I did do a hard reset after flashing back to Tomato 1.15, but not with Linksys. Do you think this could be an NVRAM issue?
Actually, I checked and found that since the hard reset I had not forwarded Port 5900 to the PC. Also, I am set to DHCP; my current IP has changed since I first set this up.
Port Forwarding In order to be able to connect to my home PC from work (using VNC), I went into Tomato setup, Port Forwarding, added 5900 for Ext Ports (left Int Port blank), and added the internal IP of my home PC for Int Address. As long as my VNC program is running on both ends, that should allow me to remote to home from work, right? And, just out of curiosity, if I didn't want to use the default Port 5900, but, e.g., Port 6000, would I do that under Port Forwarding - Triggered?
Yeah, I use to use port forwarding to allow me to connect to my Linux box via Tight VNC through my router, and it worked pretty well. However, be aware that there are some security concerns that you should consider when using VNC over an Internet connection. One is the strength of the data stream connection and man in the middle attacks. In the end, I setup my Linux box to allow for SSH connections and had my router forward to that machine when connecting on port 22. I then used tunneling to forward a local port on my work machine to my Linux box via the SSH client I was using. This allowed me to not have to have a VNC port forwarding rule, and also allowed for data encryption via the SSH protocol. I have not had any more issues with latency then doing it directly through port forwarding. In any regards, it might be a good idea to use non-standard ports for some protocols when forwarding from router to an internal machine to minimize automated bot attacks. Just make sure that you don't use a port that needs to be used by the router for something regarding keeping your Internet connection alive, ect.
How did you set up using SSH? Would this be the same, or similar, to setting up using a program like PuTTY?
Just to make sure I understand, if I set up a connection using SSH (or PuTTY), will I use that instead of my VNC?
No. If you set up a connection with SSH (or any other VPN method), you then use VNC through the VPN. This is more secure than VNC direct.
