FlyerTalk Forums - Accessing remote desktop from outside the network

Quote:

Originally Posted by themicah (Post 10554349)

Can you explain a bit more? I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of port scanning, but was under the impression that most scanners don't scan every port for every service (particularly once you get beyond 10000 or so). Besides, even if a bad guy sees that port 54321 is open on my router, how do they know which protocol to try to use to get in through it?

When I switched sshd to port 2222 on my Linux VPS from the default 22, the number of random attempts to log in plummeted. There seemed to be one persistent hacker from Romania who kept trying to get in for a few months. But when it was on port 22, there would be a half dozen attempts every day or two from all over the world.

Yes, the number of attempts will drop, but a system set up with even a trivial password will protect against those same casual probes. Those users are looking for wide open systems; they won't really expend any effort to get in to yours just because they found the port. If someone wants to actually find out if you have a service running they can scan the entire port range against your system. As for how they can find out what service is running, they can generally connect to the port and see what it replies with to make such a determination.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yevlesh2 (Post 10565839)

Thank you for the replies, I went ahead and opened port 3389 on the router. What should I enter for the name of the remote computer when configuring Remote Desktop Connection? Would it be my home IP address?

You need to enter the external IP address that your router gets from the cable/DSL company. There are a bunch of services out there that will let you set up a DNS name instead of an IP address to make it easier to use. DynDNS.com is one that I know of.