Remotely accessing another PC

[Unforgiven2644]

Ok so here is the problem I live in LA and my grandmother lives in FL she is a teacher at an art college and needs my help for tech stuff I was wondering if there is a way to remotely acess her computer which is running Vista from mine which is running Ubuntu Linux I would appreciate any help you could give on this. Also I have the same issue with my mother who lives in FL also. Is there a program I can download for both me and them?

thanks

[jmadero]

you can but it'll depend on a lot of things. Are you talking about from her house or on campus? If it's on campus it'll be much much harder, she'll need to have the admin people come in and set stuff up and you might even need to tunnel in using VNC. If you are talking about home, give some details about what kind of setup she has (ie directly connected to modem, wireless modem/router, modem->wireless router->computer, etc...also brands of routers would help

[Unforgiven2644]

She will be at home and plugged into a router directly that will be directly plugged into the modem and i believe it is an actiontec router and awesome quote btw

[yancek]

This might help:

Linux.com :: Secure remote access to your desktop

[elija]

An easy solution might be gotomypc (http://www.gotomypc.com) although it is not free in either sense of the word

[Unforgiven2644]

thanks for the help I think the gotomypc sounds like the best option anyone know of anything similar for free? and yancek I think you misunderstood I need to be working on a linux system accessing a vista system and the gotomypc would work for the linux to vista connection correct?

Thanks

[elija]

They have a linux and cross platform client so it should do. I don't know of anything similar that is free

[jmadero]

why not just rdesktop into it? I do this with my mom's computer (or did it before she switched to macs). The only thing is you need to port forward from the router

[D-cat]

As jmadero says, there's rdesktop, and you can also have her set up a VNC server, which might be a bit safer

Either way, the big thing is to open the port for whatever you're using on her firewall and set up a port forward on her router. Otherwise, any client you use her computer will be invisible.

vnc uses TCP port 5900
rdesktop uses TCP 3389 (RDP)

[jmadero]

I guess we haven't really said how so here it goes:

get into the router settings, this is dependent on the router, for linksys routers it's 192.168.1.1 in an internet browset. Look for advanced settings, port forwarding, etc...
now here you need to open up the port 5900 (I acutlaly use this port for rdesktop also) to the IP address of your grandmother. You'll have to do a command like ipconfig in terminal to get that.

Now once the port is open you need to set up remote desktop on Vista, here are instructions
Turn on Remote Desktop in Windows Vista :: the How-To Geek

Now have your grandmother visit this site:
External IP Address

get the ip address from her from that site.

Now on your side, get rdesktop
sudo apt-get intsall rdesktop

now you can remotely connect to your grandmother by doing this
rdesktop GRANDMOTHERS EXTERNAL IP