VNC port-forwarding trouble

JMonkfish · n00b Joined: 22 Jan 2004 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego, CA

I'm trying to setup a small business server (NT4) with RealVNC so that I may access the server desktop remotely. However, the router is not configurable so I'm not sure how to port-forward port 5900 to the server's LAN IP. My assumption was, if there was no port-forwarding setup, that all of the computers connected to the router would receive the data on port 5900 (but only the server would be running a service on that port) and it would still work properly.

Was that a bad assumption?

buzzin · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 6:09 pm Post subject:

..Bad...

If no port forwarding is setup, then router dosent know where to send the packet and so just drops or rejects it...

madchaz · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 6:15 pm Post subject:

you might want to consider using a more profesional router.

If you have an old PC you can use (low end pentium would work fine) you might want to give smoothwall from smoothwall.org a try. It works very well, is very powerfull and customisable and it's very secure.
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JMonkfish · n00b Joined: 22 Jan 2004 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego, CA

Eep. Thanks. Unfortunately, the app's are only compatible with Windows -- but would SmoothWall be able to fix a port-forwarding problem? It seemed like the data was simply being rejected, as buzzin had suggested.

nobspangle · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 7:58 pm Post subject:

madchaz is suggesting that if you have an old PC lying around with a couple of network cards, you can turn that into your router, with the aid of smoothwall. I personally run gentoo on my router and use shorewall to configure iptables for me.
Then you could get rid of your (crap) router and port forward to your hearts content.