Network requirement

A user wants to access his home PC from work location. The home PC (Windows) is connected to the internet via ADSL connection through a router as shown in the diagram. The work PC (Windows) is able to access internet through the

connection at work. An appropriate solution has to be identified so that the user can view and access the desktop of the home pc from the work pc.

Networking solution

The home router should have port forwarding feature available. If not, a new home router has to be purchased with the specific feature. Before the purchase, it has to be confirmed the router supports port forwarding for remote desktop or vnc application. Once the feature is available, setup the home PC as a remote desktop server. For this, remote access has to be enabled which can be done by right clicking My computer icon and enabling the option of “Allow remote access to the computer “. Once this configuration is performed, setup port forwarding on the router to allow incoming remote desktop connections on the router to forward to the home pc.

From the work pc, start the remote desktop client connection. Provide the IP address as the public IP address of the home router. The public IP address of the home router can be viewed in the status/connection tab of the home routers web management console.

This setup would successfully enable the home pc to be accessed from work.

Note: Typically, IP addresses on the routers are dynamic. So it might change after certain time. So remote desktop client connections to the home routers public ip address might fail, if it has changed. To avoid this situation, a dedicated ip address for the home router can be purchased from the ISP.