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Windows Home Server - Remote Access is working!

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This morning my wife was firmly ensconced on the couch with the puppy, catching up on her shows on Media Center.

Sensing some free time, I snuck upstairs and began poking around at getting remote access working with Windows Home Server.

The real magic came down to 2 main steps:

  • Enabling port forwarding for three ports on my router
  • Installing ISA Firewall client on my machine at work.

The port forwarding took awhile to figure out. On my Dlink router, forwarding is hidden under Advanced | Gaming. The WHS docs say that it will try to do this automatically, but it didn't work for my router at this point. Hopefully by RTM though!

As for the ISA Firewall client, if you're on the Microsoft corporate network, it's a given that you need to install it to connect to home machines. Don't ask me why or how. Networking has never been my strong point, and as long as things "just work", I'm happy to focus my time on other areas.

So here's how it played out: I had a Remote Desktop connection to my work machine on campus. From that session, I opened a browser and entered the externally visible IP address of my home router. Soon I was presented with a "Windows Home Server" login page.

At the WHS login page I entered my username/password for my home account. A new page appeared with three tabs:

  • Home
  • Computers
  • Shared Folders

Clicking on the "Computers" tab, I saw the four machines on my home network. I selected my wife's laptop, and was prompted for her credentials. After entering them, a full screen Remote Desktop window appeared, and I was logged in to her machine. At that point I had to go drag my wife and puppy away from from the TV to show them. They were suitably impresed; my wife more so than the puppy.

Ponder for a second just a few of the machines involved in seeing my wife's desktop on the other side of the room:

  • My home machine
  • My work machine
  • ISA Server at Microsoft
  • Windows Home Server box in my downstairs closet
  • Wife's laptop

Since I'd previously set up a dynamic DNS account, I then tried entering that name in my browser, rather than a hardcoded IP address. To my pleasant surprise, it worked right away.

With the basics in place, I've now created accounts for several family members in CA and AZ, and have given them read-only access to a few folders such as photos. Now if I could just get one of them to call me back, I'll be able to see how well it works in "the real world".

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2007
    You need the ISA Firewall Client to access Internet resources from the Microsoft Corpnet because the Internet is not routable from Corpnet (the routers deployed do not have the routing entries that point to the Internet; they only have the entries for internal routing). The ISA Firewall Client gets around this by sending all Internet-bound traffic to the ISA Server machines on the edge of Corpnet, where the Internet is routable.

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2007
    If your puppy wasn't impressed, it's time to get a new puppy. On a more serious note, thanks for the inspiration!

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2007
    WHS probably needs UPnP to be enabled on your router in order to perform the port mappings itself. This may be hard to find in the router configuration, of course!

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2007
    Oh no.  My wife has been jealous because our cat likes to sit in my lap and get in the way of me using my computer, but doesn't like to sit in her lap and get in the way of her using her computer.  So now she's going to demand a puppy. But if I did an RDP connection to her computer, she would notice it when she gets logged off, right?  (I haven't actually done an RDP connection to an ordinary PC.  I started to once, but quit because of the warning that the local user on the target PC would get logged off.)

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2007
    I had this enabled with my beta of WHS, but I've turned it off because I have security concerns. Until I can find out a bit more about what if any security features are enabled I think I'll continue to use products like LogMeIn to remote access my home machines.