On Sun, 2005-08-21 at 00:58 +0100, David Simon Cooper wrote:
What I meant about the static IP's was this. I get three static IP addresses assigned, create static routes on the router then connect straight through to the boxes individually just using the static IP's and static NAT. I would of course only allow in the VNC ports. I thought this combined with the user app being loaded and unloaded on request would mean a fairly secure and simple solution. I have never used a VPN and do not know what it is, I may read up on it and learn the functionality before making a decision.
Rather than doing that I would go with NAT and Port Forwarding.
i.e You have an internal address range of say 192.168.0.1-255.255.255.0 You then set up your router to forward a different port to each machine so 5901 goes to a machine on 192.168.0.2 5902 goes to 192.168.0.3 and so on.
On Netgear's I don't think you can do a port redirection at the same time as port forwarding (you can't on our one at work anyway) so you would have to set the vnc server on each machine to run on the correct port for that machine (so machine 192.168.0.3 would need the vnc server running on 5902.)
With this way you would connect to a single fixed ip address but have different machines available in the same way that user sessions are on a Linux VNC host. i.e. customeripaddrees:1 would be machine 1 customeripaddress:2 would be machine 2
This works because without the :number vnc assumes port 5900 (default for Windows because there is only one session) and the bit after the colon defines the session specific port hence you get 5901 5902 etc.
The advantage of doing it this way is that it is more scalable because you don't have to ask the ISP for another address every time you add a machine (also I seem to remember BT charging monthly for extra fixed IP addresses)
But I'd still look into the VPN option, it may be overkill for your current needs..but they are still very useful things to understand.