Remote Desktops

[cheezit]

Hey guys,
I'm working on a setup to get around my school's sandviney connection and I've stumbled upon remote desktop as a potential solution So far my setup involves two comps; my computer at home (with which I do all my seeding) and my laptop (with which I pull stuff off). Before I invest in some major hardware upgrades for the home base comp, I'd like to know if any of you guys have tried this setup, and if it works for you.

thanks,
Cheezit

[rocket357]

AFAIK Remote Desktop transmits in the clear, so honestly I'd think you'd want to look into tunnelling over ssh or such to keep it a bit more private (and mask what port you're *really* using).

I use Remote Desktop daily over a vpn from home -> work and in the clear for from work -> work. It's not bad but from home -> work can be exceptionally laggy, even on my reasonably fast 8 Mbps DSL connection.

[curlywagner]

RDP is 128-bit encrypted.
You could use Putty on your client PC and OpenSSH on your server (home) PC to tunnel RDP. Use Dyndns if (like me) you have a dynamic IP address.
Another solution is logmein.

[Tompen]

Hey guys,
I'm working on a setup to get around my school's sandviney connection and I've stumbled upon remote desktop as a potential solution So far my setup involves two comps; my computer at home (with which I do all my seeding) and my laptop (with which I pull stuff off). Before I invest in some major hardware upgrades for the home base comp, I'd like to know if any of you guys have tried this setup, and if it works for you.

thanks,
Cheezit

Many schools and work don´t allow conection to a home computer using remote desktop. In the firewalls they have closed port 3389 used by remote desktop. If yu want to workaround that you can change the port used by remote connection in your home computer. More info here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306759/en-us

If the port is changed, you need to connect using the new port.

Example:
I used the above article and changed the Remote Desktop port to 80 in my home computer (and restarted it).

Then I need to type:
ipadress:80

in remote desktop when Im at work if I want to connect to my home computer.
The ipadress is of course to my home computer.

Cheers
Tompen

[rocket357]

RDP is 128-bit encrypted.

Ok, with a bit of further research, yeah, RDP is 128 bit RC4 encrypted...but versions prior to RDP v6.0 (i.e. XP prior to SP3), don't verify server/client keys, making it vulnerable to MIM attacks...meaning it might as well be sent in cleartext.

I'd still tunnel it as a means to mask the true protocol and to further enhance encryption capability...but I'm paranoid, so take what I say with a grain of salt haha.