On 19 Oct 2006 at 17:28, Larry Adler wrote:

> I have been trying to access my home desktop from the road via XP Pro's 
> Remote Desktop program, but so far have struck out making a "long-distance" 
> connection. As long as I am here at the house using the same IP connection 
> (my router), I am able to "see" the desktop from my laptop, but when I am 
> away from home I've tried everything I can think of, most notably using the 
> actual IP address rather than router address, and still I get a message that 
> says the desktop is not configured for the connection or the network is 
> busy, the latter of which certainly couldn't be the case.
> 
> Could there be a setting in the router that I need to make? I would welcome 
> any other suggestions.

  Do you have a block of static addresses allocated by your ISP (this is 
usually an expensive "business class" service...) which are used as the LAN 
addresses on your home network, and so your router uses a separate WAN 
address also issued by your ISP?  Or do you have the router set to forward 
its WAN address (or specific ports) to the LAN address of your dektop 
machine?
  If neither, that would be why it's not working.  By default, the IP 
addresses that the router gives to local machines are *private* addresses 
that are mapped via NAT to the outside world, and there's no way for the 
global Internet to guess that your machine on the road wants the private 
addresses that are behind *your* router -- and not a few million others.

  The WAN address of the router, from your ISP, will at least be a unique 
public address (although it may CHANGE from time to time).  But unless you 
set up mapping or port-forwarding (some makers misidentify it as "DMZ"), the 
router has no way to know which LAN machine you'd like to have respond.

David Gillett

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