VNC/ internal & external IP addresses

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Im Baffled.

What I’m aiming to do is to be able to connect from my work pc to my home pc. My home pc has RealVNC installed and configured. My work pc has RealVNC installed and configured.

Im at home at the moment, and have a laptop and my home pc infront of me. From my laptop, I can connect remotely to my home pc by entering its internal IP address. It doesn’t connect when im entering the external ip address.

Both my laptop and home pc connect to my router wirelessly. I’ve checked on a few websites, and they all say both systems have the same external IP address. I’m not too clued up on ip addresses, but im guessing this is correct as I only have one router, and it’s the only link from my network to the internet?

From outside my network, how do I then connect to either system if they both share the same ip address? I’ve set up port forwarding on my router btw.
 
Triad2000 said:
Have VNC listen on different ports on the PCs.

Opening your PC to the Internet with VNC is a highly scary prospect.


Erm why?

As long as the PC has a decent firewall rule set and a decent VNC password it's perfectly fine.
 
VNC can use AES encyption, so I'd say it's pretty secure tbh.. VPN for home use is a bit OTT in most cases.

As for the original question, simply set the VNC servers on different ports, then set up port-forwarding on your router to set it that for example; when the router gets a connection to 5900 it forwards that request to the PC with an internal address of 192.168.1.2 (which has the VNC server setup on port 5900) and when a router gets an outside request for port 5901 it forwards that request to the PC with IP 192.168.1.3 (which has the vnc server setup on port 5901).

To access it from the outside world you would simply do;

[outsideipaddress]:[port] in the VNC viewer.

eg. 80.0.0.0:5900 for PC1 and 80.0.0.0:5901 for PC2.
 
If you use the professional version of realvnc you have have encryption. If you use the standard version the following applies:

VNC Free Edition and older VNC 3 based systems support a simple challenge-response protocol used to verify a password of up to eight characters, supplied by the connecting user. While this avoids exposing the password to attackers as would be the case with pure plaintext protocols such as telnet, the rest of the session is unencrypted and so anything typed into the viewer passes "in the clear" to the server. VNC Free Edition is therefore suitable for use within a local network or secure VPN, but not for general use over untrusted networks, such as the Internet.
 
Before doing all of this see if your router allows VPN connections to be made to it.
If it supports this then setup a VPN user profile on it, then configure your machine at work to connect to your home network on your external address.
Then just VNC to the internal address as normal.

Failing that use something like the free version of Logmein which requires much less effort.
https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/get_logmein_free/signup.asp
 
Do you need to have a Static IP from your ISP for this to work? I have a dynamic external ip from my ISP so i couldnt do it?
 
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