Vonage & RDC: Happy Together
April 30th, 2006, 6:42pm by JakeAs some of you may remember, I helped set up Aaron’s Vonage telephone service a year & a half ago. He did eventually get it running throughout his house as the second line, and it’s been working fine ever since. Although he still has yet to make the switch to a Mac, he’s had Windows Remote Desktop running on his new XP machine in-house for the past year or so. Well, thanks in part to the flat world, he’s getting a new office and will be working remotely quite often. His plan is to still use his laptop as a client for the home machine, so we needed to set up port forwarding to use it remotely. The complicating factor was that the Vonage box sits between the cable modem & the router, so it’s not as easy as just forwarding port 3389 to the desktop and being done. Instead, I had to dig up the manual for the Vonage box so I could figure it out. As suggested here, we set up the router to be the DMZ box from the Vonage box, meaning that all ports except the Vonage ones are forwarded to the router. Then I set up the router to forward RDC connections to the desktop, as described here. Finally, I set up a dynamic dns account. Only thing left to do is to get a good DynDNS.org client to run on his PC. Any suggestions? Also, with that ancient Linksys router, is there a way to pmake sure it always assigns the same local IP address to his desktop in case the router or computer reboots? It assigned a new one to the desktop at some point during the set-up & troubleshooting.