VNC access through internet from behind firewall

[fishkake]

Hello people, I'm in way over my head here...

What I have is a PC at home (homepc), constantly online and assigned a hostname with a dynamic update client (no-ip.com). There is no firewall running on this machine, and as far as I know it should be as open to the world as any basic XP SP2 machine.

homepc is running a VNC server, version 4 I think, which I can access from other PCs on my local network at home fine.

I also have another machine at my flat at University (unipc), which is behind a horrible dirty firewall which blocks everything except 80 (http), 21 (ftp) and 25 (smtp).

I want to be able to access homepc from unipc using the VNC viewer. The VNC server runs on port 5900, and I had lots of trouble changing it to one of my three available ones (error 10061 all over the place, for those who know VNC!). I have read about SSH tunneling, but this still seems to require a server on port 22 to function.

Ideally I want to be able to get around this from unipc, without having to drive 50 miles to get to homepc! I realise this probably isn't possible now, so the next best solution would involve a process that I could get my semi-computer-literate brother to do (ie. something simple!)

Sorry for the long post, hope somebody can help!

 

[Serbtastic]

What home router are you using? On some, you can redirect one port to another, so in your case you would redirect port 80, 21 or 25 to port 5900 on your VNC server's IP address.

 

[fishkake]

Unfortunately, I don't have a router. What I have is a horrible USB DSL modem, with no configuration whatsoever, no port forwarding, nothing.

Interesting perspective though, could I accomplish this with software? Is there such a thing as a software router which can do port forwarding? Security is not an issue here, I don't have anything confidential on my home machine...

 

[Serbtastic]

Then just configure your VNC server to listen on port 80 and you should be able to connect just fine (assuming the university doesn't run an application level firewall).

 

[fishkake]

When I do that, I can't even connec locally, I get the 10061 error, and when I search the web, it seems I'm not the only one...

 

[Serbtastic]

Make sure you are using a VNC client that allows for connections on non-standard ports (like UltraVNC viewer).