Invite a friend … Remote Assistance problem (XP SP 2)

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Hi,

I’m in Holland with my Toshiba laptop running XP Media Edition SP2: my wife is in UK with her Toshiba laptop running SP Home edition SP2. Both of us are on wifi connections to an access point and our routers are connected to wideband internet modems. Internet and e-mail works for both of us.

My wife just sent me an invitation to assist her by connecting to her PC. Her Norton AV has stopped working and Windows Security Centre is complaining with a popup window every few minutes.

She sent the invitation by e-mail and I received it a few seconds later. However, when I used the attachment to connect to her PC I received the message “Remote Assistance could not be established because the remote host name could not be resolved. Please try again.”

She sent me a second e-mail invitation (password protected like the first one), but I had the same problem.

What might be the problem?

All ideas and thoughts gratefully received.

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Have her e-mail you the IP address of her PC. Start | Run | cmd.exe | ipconfig.exe

Joe

--Joe

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Is your wife’s computer behind a firewall, or some kind of NAT address translation? If so it won’t work. The RDP from your side will fail at the remote firewall because it doesn’t have the internal address of the client requesting assistance.
When someone behind ISA firewall receives a request, their PC attempts to open an RDP session outbound through the ISA. If the destination is not behind a firewall it will work. However, if the destination is behind another NAT device, there is no way to route the incoming RDP connection past the boundary to the actual destination workstation. NAT only knows about outbound connections; incoming can’t be associated with the right internal IP behind the NAT device. Same problem with audio/video/whiteboard in IM clients.

The most common workaround at the moment is a third party website (Webex, Live Meeting, etc.), not ideal but better than nothing.

But are you sure you need Remote Assistance at all? Remote Assistance has limited capabilities and the same result can be achieved with e-mail exchange.
See How to use remote assistance in Windows XP for more information.

If you want to get a full access of your wife’s computer, you need to use Remote Desktop feature (Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance).
Unfortunately, you must to have Windows XP Professional installed on your computer and any flavor of Windows XP on your wife’s computer to run Remote Desktop session.

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