remote desktop connection over internet

Question

In our office, a laptop (windows 7 home premium 64 bit) has been set up to use remote desktop connection so to establish a connection over the internet with a specific client of the network, when it's been located outside the office. The configuration was set up in order the laptop's user to fill an ip of the following form: 143.26.65.74:50001 (143.26.65.74 is the external IP address, but obviously not the actual one) in remote desktop connection. I 've changed he hard drive due to fault and i would like to re-configure this remote set-up. I think that this wasn't made by port forwarding in the router, nor with the use VPN. Could someone please tell thow this can be done again?

\Michalis

Answer 1

Except for VPN and port forwarding it's not possible to get RDP access to a host behind a NAT router. The nature of NAT doesn't allow for it, since the host inside the network first has to set up a connection to the outside world before packets can flow back to the host. Port forwarding changes this by explicitly allowing packets sent to a specific port to be forwarded to another host in the network.

That said, there are alternative protocols which allow traversal of NAT routers by connecting to a central server and let the connection go through that server, for example Teamviewer