VNC connection to PC behind corporate firewall & cantSetup portforward

[aarondunny]

Well not a corporate but a university. OK i want to use TightVNC and access my sisters computer when she goes off to college from home. i already use VNC on her and all my other computers in my home LAN and use port forward with my router so i can access them anywhere. But i have no clue access her computer when she is at college becouse u cant setup portforwarding. i heard of GoToMyPc.com (client establishes the connection to there servers), but i want to use something thats free like VNC. i also thought of VPN passthrough, that is if the university allows it, and no idea how to connect her PC to my Netgear FVS318 router via VPN, but know how to VPN two routers but dont want to buy a router for her dorm (if that would even work)
if anyone knows any ideas, documentation and/or programs on this please let me know...

 

[John Lewis]

First, VNC across the internet is not a good idea. Little effort has been put into securing the protocols as that was never the primary focus of the project. For that reason, it is best to run VNC over a VPN connection or SSH.

Neither of those will solve your port forwarding or firewall problems. If VNC ports are blocked, VPN ports are likely blocked as well. If they are not blocked, you may be able to connect directly to the computer as many universities assign public addresses to each machine. The reason you need port forwarding at home is because all of your machines share one public IP.

Either way, it would seem to me that the best solution would be to make the connection from the server side in this case. Right click on the VNCServer icon in the tray and select 'add clients'. You may find that outbound connections are blocked to the standard VNC ports, but you can easily change your port settings to use something very standard (even port 80, unless you happen to be running a web server as well).

Additionally, I would suggest that you run the server as an application and only start it when it is needed. This will decrease the risk involved in running without a secure connection.