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Run your PC from afar — securely and easily
By Susan Bradley

Your office PC is miles away, when suddenly you realize you forgot that all-important file — what to do?
Luckily, there are free tools (including one possibly residing in Windows) that give you remote access — or even full-scale remote control — of your PC, as if you were sitting right in front of it.

The full text of this column is posted at http://WindowsSecrets.com/2010/04/15/02

Can you expand a bit on this? Many people like myself have firewall routers and/or firewall software guarding their systems. In my case I have both. Since the router is using NAT to assign addresses to my internal network, it seems impossible to access my PCs from a remote site, unless there is some way to configure the router to allow the connection via some forwarding method.

You would also have to open up ports in the firewall (software and/or router) to allow the communication to take place. Do these packages provide the info on how to configure that?

You also left out another method, which is using ssh. For Windows I have installed Cygwin and used ssh -X to remotely access my Solaris and Linux systems. This would also allow access to Mac systems running OSX, which is a version of Linux. I have not tried it, but it probably would also allow access to another Windows system that is also running Cygwin.

Mike Riley