Remote Access to Your PC From Anywhere
Remote Access to Your PC From Anywhere
There's going to come a time when you're going to be at
work, on vacation, or at a friend's or relatives' house
in which you find yourself wishing you were at your computer.
Perhaps you left that important spreadsheet on your computer at
home, that you need for this afternoon's meeting. What you
really want is a way to remotely access your computer from where
ever you happen to be. Think about the possibilities, the cool
factor, the shear simplicity that remote access to your PC
provides. No more carrying around files on a pen drive, cd, or
the dreaded floppy disk. No more having multiple copies of files
scattered about on different machines and different drives. No
more wondering which of these multiple copies is the latest and
greatest with your most recent changes. No more shuffling files
to gmail, yahoo, or msn in an attempt to move them from one place
to another. And finally there'll be no more emailing yourself
a file. Nope those days are over. You want remote access to your
PC from anywhere in the world.
There's many different ways to achieve remote access, with a
variety of different programs. Each have their own challenges and
security issues. Some offer more features than others and some
are more difficult to use than others. I'm going to explain,
one method of remote access to your PC, with a program called
TightVNC. It can be downloaded for free at
"http://www.tightvnc.com/">http://www.tightvnc.com. The VNC
part of TightVNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. Basically
it allows you to remotely access your PC as if you were sitting
right in front of it. Complete with wallpaper, icons, programs,
and anything else you have installed on your computer at home. If
you have high speed internet and a personal router there can be
some issues with your firewall, which we'll cover next week,
that can prevent this from working right out of the box. For the
most part it's a snap to set up. If you are behind a
firewall(and shame on you if you're not), you may wish to
test this from another machine on your local network.
Once you have TightVNC downloaded and installed, go to
Start->TightVNC->Launch TightVNC Server. The first time, it
will ask you a few questions about the setup. Here's
you'll want to check “Accept socket connections”,
change the password and confirm it, and leave “Display or
port numbers to use:” at “auto”. All other
settings are fine at the default setting. At this point just
click “OK”. You should now see a little white box in
your system try(where your clock is) that contains a large black
“V”. This tells you that TightVNC sever is running
and listening for connections. If you hold you mouse over that
icon it will display you IP address. You'll need this in
order to remote into you system later, so make a note of it. Mine
happens to be 192.168.0.102. Now all we have to do is install
TightVNC (really just the viewer part) on another machine. Launch
it by going to Start->TightVNC->TightVNCViewer. Now just
type in the IP(192.168.0.102) from above and click enter. You
should now see your desktop of your “Remote” machine
on the client(the machine you're sitting at) in front of you.
A couple of things to be aware of. If you feel the desire to test
the server by logging into it with a client on the same machine,
resists the urge. It's not damaging, but it'll look like
things do when you hold a mirror up to mirror. Another neat trick
is that if you don't want to install the viewer, or it just
isn't an option, you can remote into your machine using your
favorite browser. Open any web browser with javascript enabled at
http://your_ip_address:5800 in my case http://192/168.0.102:5800.
Now in either case you should have your fully working desktop
right in front of you as if you were sitting at your desk. Enjoy.
