I work at home, and like most techies I know, I have a router that sits behind my cable modem and provides Internet access for all the computers in my house, both wired and wireless. This router provides a firewall and NAT like most devices of its ilk, and this makes it a little more tricky for me to use Remote Assistance to help my less technical friends and coworkers. The FAQs for Remote Assistance make it sound like if the routers on either end support Universal Plug and Play, you won't have any trouble. If anybody knows how to figure out if a router supports this, leave a comment on this blog entry. I suspect that if you are looking for help using Remote Assistance, your router, like mine, probably doesn't support UPnP.
This morning I spent a few minutes searching and reading FAQs and figured out how to get this working even without UPnP on either side. If you use the same technique I did, your friend's computer will end up establishing a TCP connection to your computer over port 3389. That's the port normally used by Remote Desktop (I assume Remote Assistance is just another version of this anyway, so this makes sense). So the first trick is to set up port forwarding on your router to forward port 3389 to the computer you want to use to help your friend. If you don't know how to do this for your router, contact support for your router device and ask them to help you out (IOW, I'm not going to try to explain it here :)
IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTE: Unless you're also planning on using Remote Desktop to access your own computer from the Internet, you should ensure that Remote Desktop is disabled on your computer, because by forwarding port 3389 to your computer, you are allowing Internet access to your remote desktop port. To verify this, right-click My Computer and choose Properties|Remote settings. Ensure that Remote Desktop is disabled (it's the lower group box, and it's disabled by default: "Don't allow connections to this computer").
With Remote Assistance, your friend has three options for requesting assistance from you. He can send an email, a file, or use Windows Live Messenger to initiate the request. I first had my friend try the email option, but I suspected it wouldn't work based on the FAQs I'd read earlier. And sure enough, it did not; when I opened the attachment in the resulting email, typed in our previously agreed upon password and clicked Yes to initiate the connection, the connection request timed out. It makes me wonder if in that case my computer wasn't trying to connect to his. But I didn't spend time diagnosing it.
Instead, I asked my friend to initiate the request via Windows Live Messenger. He double-clicked my name, which brought up a chat window. Under the Actions or Tools menu (I forget which) he selected, "Request remote assistance", which brought up a chat window with the typical "Accept" and "Decline" links. I clicked accept, and after about 10 seconds and a second confirmation from him, I was looking at his screen. Woohoo! Then I clicked "Take Control" and after his confirmation, I was able to control his machine remotely, even though both of us were behind firewall/NAT devices.
Here's the two pages that were most helpful for me:
I hope this helps someone out there get RA working. It's a great way to help out your coworkers, friends and family!
Posted
Jan 14 2008, 08:24 AM
by
keith-brown