Remote Desktop From Outside Network

Question

I've got a school demo tomorrow and because I don't have a laptop I need to use remote desktop to access a DB on my home machine for the demo. I can access my desktop from another machine on my ethernet by using the IP address I get from ipconfig, but here's the problem:

The address of my home machine from ipconfig is of the form 192.168.1.XXX where my subnet mask is 256.256.256.0

I'm worried that once I'm on a machine outside of my ethernet the 192.168.1.XXX address will no longer work because I think that that address is relative to my ethernet. Is there a way I can find out my computer's public IP address or am I just being paranoid and the address I have is the public one?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

192.x.x.x and 10.x.x.x are internal ip addresses to your network so you are right, it won't work. Are you able to install software on your home computer and the computer you are connecting from? If so you could use http://www.teamviewer.com/en/index.aspx (it is free for private use). I use it on my family's computers to remotely help them with troubleshooting issues. If you have a Windows box you can also use remote assistance.

Answer 2

You are correct that 192.168.1.xxx will not work from your school's network, or at least it won't point to your home network. That is a local-only address.

What you can do is set up port-forwarding on your home router to forward remote-desktop packets to your machine at home, say 192.168.1.2.

So what you'll need is:

a) the public IP of your router; you can either go to one of those "what is my IP" websites to find it, or use traceroute/tracert to see it.

b) configure port-forwarding on your home router to 192.168.1.2 (the machine with the DB on it that you want to remote in to). Not sure of the exact port but usually the router will have a named option like "Remote Desktop" to figure it out for you. - to do this, you can usually go to http://192.168.1.xxx (or whatever your router's local IP is), enter admin credentials, and configure the port-forwarding from there.

Then when at school, you would remote to your home router's public IP, and everything should just work. Good luck!