PC Remote Control through Aiport Router

[greenidge]

I am trying to access our Church's streaming PC from home using my PC. I am using VNC and within the church network it works fine but I can't see it ffrom outside. The church has a Aiport Extreme Router as a gateway and I am trying to figure out how to tell it to allow me access to the streaming PC. I can login to it and I think "port forwarding" is what I need to do but I am unfamiliar with Mac hardware so I can use some help in getting this setup properly.

[petereit]

Yes, you need to set up a port forward on your router. Just google "route vnc apple airport" and you should find more than a few tutorials to point you in the right direction.

[waynehoskins]

VNC conventionally uses port 5900, so that's probably the port you want to forward. But beware: opening a VNC port to the outside world is a pretty big security risk.

A far more attractive solution is to set up a Virtual Private Network. OpenVPN is the way I've gone for that: with a VPN, you can set it up so that any client on the VPN can see all other clients on the VPN as though they were on the same local subnet -- even though they're on different networks in different places, even behind multiple levels of routers and firewalls.

[greenidge]

I would prefer the most secure route which sounds like the OpenVPN option. Would that get in the way of any other networking that is set up already? The office and the Pastors homes are right next door and they all are on the church's network.

[waynehoskins]

OpenVPN is very transparent and unobtrusive that way. All you need is a publicly-visible computer running an OpenVPN server. At work, we have that running on a server in our data center; for me, I have that running on my server that sits in my office. If you have a server available to do that, it's a great way. I would imagine (though I haven't looked to see if it exists) that there are hosting options as well.

[greenidge]

"All you need is a publicly-visible computer running an OpenVPN server."

Please explain what's involved here, I am trying to connect to the PC at the church that is on their network, which is connected to the Internet. I would be connecting from home on my PC, also on the internet. Would the church PC be the one that would need to have the OpenVPN Server software running on it?
I loaded OpenVPN on it last night(with the Windows GUI) but I am not sure where to go from here. Can you help? Again I need to control the PC remotely, that's it.

[frank]

Teamviewer has a Mac version and does all the figuring out how to get through routers and set up a secure link. Free for personal/non-commercial use. LOVE it!

[bpalermini]

If all you need to do is to control the remote PC just use LogMeIn free. It works great. I have all of the family PC's that I support on it and don't know what I would do without it.

I have never experienced a problem getting through a router, including our Airport at work.

[greenidge]

OK, I will give it a try tonight, thanks very much! I will update you tomorrow. I was told that VNC is a security risk, what do you kow about this service ffrom a security standpoint?

[Arlin]

Another vote for LogMeIn (free version).
Works great!

[waynehoskins]

Logmein offers equivalent functionality to OpenVPN. One of our people at work uses it with no problems.

The function of a router is to isolate networks -- your church network from the raw internet, your home network from the raw internet, and so on. Each computer on the internet is assigned an Internet Protocol address that uniquely identifies it and by which other computers can connect to it, in the same sense as a phone number does for the telephone system.

In a private network, the gateway or router is assigned a (usually) routable IP address; it's hanging out there on the raw internet. Your private network behind the router is assigned non-routable IP addresses. They can initiate communication out to the internet through the router, which accepts outbound traffic and knows how to route replies back to the originating private computer. All traffic going through the router is seen as coming from the router's public IP address -- in much the same way that a business telephone system with extensions has one public number, each extension is able to talk locally and dial out, but a specific extension can't be directly dialed from the outside.

OpenVPN allows client computers on different private networks to communicate (essentially) directly by connecting them all to a VPN gateway server which has a public IP. The VPN establishes a second "network interface" and uses a different set of non-routable IPs, usually in the 10.x.x block. Once the VPN is established and clients are connected, they communicate on the VPN subnet through the gateway server in much the same way as a local network does on its local subnet (usually in the 192.168.x block).

The server could be any computer with a public IP, that you can connect directly to over the internet from any location. The computers at the church and your home would be clients on the VPN.

It would probably be far simpler to go the LogMeIn route. They do the same sort of thing, relaying traffic between your home computer and church computer through their servers that both computers can see.

[greenidge]

I hear you, thanks for the great explanation. I just installed LogMeIn on my local PC, it was pretty straightforward. I will try at the church tonight.