Remote Desktop over the Internet from Windows or OS X

While you may think you need to run a separate server application like Internet Information Services (IIS) to be able to connect to your Windows XP/2003 machine over the internet, the Remote Desktop (RD) application built-in to Windows XP Professional Edition and Windows 2003 is installed as a service that can be configured to be constantly listening for incoming connection requests. Therefore you do not need to add the IIS component or have another server application running to be able to remotely access your PC. Microsoft provides you with a number of ways to connect to your server, such as through Internet Explorer or even with a RD client application for OS X.

This article is part 1 of a 2-part series in which I was researching the easiest possible way to remotely connect to and administer my mom’s Windows PC, ideally with her still logged-in. The first possible solution was to enable Remote Desktop Connection and the Remote Assistance capability, like many corporate IT shops do with their users. The screenshot below shows where you need to check these options. You can press the Windows key + Pause|Break to launch System Properties, then find these options under the Remote tab.

I wanted to explicitly add myself as a user on my mom’s machine so that I could use that account to connect, so I created a password-protected account called “andy.” However, this solution would not allow my mom to stay logged-in while I was fixing the computer, but I decided that having an account that would not be “messed with” would be a good idea as a backup in the event that her account was not working.

Enabling ports on your router and firewall

The next thing you will need to do to get RD working over the internet is to open up ports on your router (if you connect to the internet with a router, wired or wireless), usually called “Port Forwarding.” What this does is allows certain services (or “ports”) to allow requests from the outside world, since most of the 65,536 ports are blocked by default. You might also need to explicitly “allow” ports on a personal software firewall such as Sygate, Kerio, Norton, etc. If you are running the built-in Windows XP Firewall (comes with Service Pack 2), the Remote Desktop Connection port 3389 will automatically be opened up for you if you choose to enable this service. On your router or on any other personal firewall software, you will need to forward port 3389 to permit Remote Desktop connection activity.

In the screenshot below you can see that I have added port 3389 to the wireless configuration of my mom’s router and chose the server PC to be 192.168.0.2, the IP address assigned to her machine by DHCP. Make sure you know which PC you will be forwarding port 3389 to. If you don’t know what IP your device has been assigned, open up a command prompt and run ipconfig /all to discover your device’s IP. For more instructions on how to find your IP address, visit this Pain in the Tech article. Advanced users might want to look into defining a static route to the PC they wish to connect to with RD. If you have multiple machines you would like to communicate with using RD, it is possible to edit the registry and define the RD port for each machine to be something other than the default port, then forward specific ports to specific IP addresses. Refer to this geek.com article on Remote Desktop registry hacking.

Remote Desktop through a web browser

As I mentioned above, what I was really looking for was a way to connect to my mom’s computer from a PC or a Mac so that I could help her when she needed help and I didn’t have to make any special arrangements to be at a PC. Microsoft claims it is possible to connect through RD using an Active-X-enabled browser (Internet Explorer), so naturally I wanted to try this out on my Mac. After installing IE for OS X, I was disappointed to find out that it would continually crash until I gave up and removed it from my iBook. If you are able to get Internet Explorer to run reliably on OS X, you may want to do a search on how to connect through to a remote machine through the Windows Remote Desktop protocol using just the browser. In summary, you can download Internet Explorer for OS X, although I don’t recommend it.

Remote Desktop client for OS X

I still wanted to able to connect using the RD protocol from my Mac. What I recommend instead of IE is the Remote Desktop client for OS X. I downloaded this small application and found that it worked very well, with zero “GUI fluff.” I did have some difficulty extracting the file however, so make sure you grab Stuffit to inflate the compressed file if you don’t have this application on your Mac already.

While the menu options were sparse, the program felt clean and worked well, even over a borrowed WiFi connection.

One thing worth mentioning was that I kept getting “out of range” errors on the monitor when I tried to log-in to the local (server) computer, meaning that the video card was still sending screen output to the network instead of to the monitor. Instead of doing a hard reboot on the local computer, I could do a “shutdown -r” from the command prompt, and return to normal operation.

What about “Remote Assistance?”

I tried to setup the “Remote Assistance” through Windows by choosing the option to send an email out with the “invitation” attached, however the application would freeze and I would have to kill the process. I was able to save the Remote Assistance invitation to a file and mail it out using Outlook, but I didn’t have another Windows machine to test it from and started to feel like all the trouble wasn’t worth it.

Summary

In summary, it’s easy to connect using Remote Desktop to a Windows machine from another Windows machine or even from OS X. Make sure you open up port 3389 on your router and your firewall, have the service enabled, and have a password-protected account you will use to connect with. While I haven’t tried this personally, I’ve read that it is even possible to connect using Remote Desktop from a PDA, so you should be able to connect to your home desktop regardless of what type of mobile device you are carrying with you.