Remote Control

Use your computer to control another computer (remotely!)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

This article is about how to remote control another computer. It deals with Macs and PC’s, OSX and Windows XP.

Sometimes you need to access another PC but for some reason, you can’t simply walk over to it and pick up the mouse. In this scenario, ideally you’d want to be able to logon to that remote computer without moving an inch and using the controls of the computer in front of you. That’s all possible with a few simple things setup in advance.

Windows XP
Find you way to Start Menu: Programs: Accessories: Communications: Remote Desktop. This is where you can access the little Windows app that lets you remote connect to another Windows PC. But first, you need to setup the remote PC to receive incoming connections.

To do this, Right-click MyComputer and choose Properties from the contextual menu that drops out. This opens the System Properties menu. Click the remote tab and tick the box that says ‘Allow users to connect remotely to this computer’. Then click the ‘Select Remote users’ button next to that box. Here you need to add any user accounts that you want to allow to login to this PC. These are user accounts that already exist on this PC. You can find and edit these accounts in Control Panel: User Accounts. The best thing to do is to create a new user in the User Control Panel called ‘Remote’ and set a complex password (8 letters and numbers mixed up and not meaningful). Then, in the Remote access: Select users dialogue box, click ‘Add’ and type the user name (in this case Remote) into the text area and click ‘Ok’. Then click ‘Ok’ again to return to the System Properties window.

Now you have turned on Remote access and setup a User account that can login.

Connect
Go to the PC that you want to use to control this PC and choose Start Menu: Programs: Accessories: Communications: Remote Desktop. In the little connection window that opens, type the network address of the remote PC. If you do not know the network address, go back to the remote PC and choose Start Menu: Run, then type CMD into the text field that appears and click ‘Ok’. In the black screen that opens, type IPCONFIG and hit enter. This will then tell you the IP address of the PC. This is the address to type into the Remote Access connection window on the Controlling PC.

When you have entered the address of the remote PC you wish to control and clicked ‘connect’ the Remote Access app will ask you for a user name and password. Here you type in the User account you have previously setup on the controlled PC. In this case Remote. This will then login to the remote OC as that user. The controlled PC’s desktop will appear and, with a small time lag, you can operate that PC as if it were your own!

Mac Connect
Once the setup of the PC is done, as above, you can also use a small FREE app on a Macintosh computer to login and control a PC in exactly the same way! Go to the URL below and download the free app, then install it and start it up.

RDC main page
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient

Once started, it is almost the same in appearance as the PC version. Simply enter the network address of the PC you wish to control and click ‘Connect’ you will then be asked for the login User Name and password.

Connect from outside your network
So far we have looked at how to control a remote PC that resides on the same network as the controller PC. We have not looked at how to connect and control a PC on another network.

Scenario: you are at home on your broadband network and you want to login and control a PC in your office (also on a broadband network).

Routing
Firstly, to be able to route outside traffic into your network, you need a static IP address assigned to your router. If you don’t already have that setup, here is a good article on the subject. http://corz.org/comms/hardware/router/static.ip.address.php

When that is in place, you need to configure your router to forward incoming traffic on a specific port to a computer on its network. This is called Port forwarding. Most modern routers will have a configuration page that allows you to manage these ports. Mine looks like this.

Application Ext port Int port Protocol IP address Enabled
RDC 3389 3389 TCP 192.168.8.34 yes


Here you can see how it is done. Login to your router using a browser (you will need to know the IP address of your router and the Admin username and password) and find the screen similar to this, usually called advanced routing, port forwarding or applications. Copy the above details, changing the IP address part to that IP address of the PC you wish to control. Once done, this means that when you are outside your office network, you can use the Remote Desktop Connection app to connect to the PC in the office. You do this by typing the initial connection string as follows:

Static IP address of your router:3389

eg: 81.86.131.245:3389

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.