Remote Desktop Connection Quandry

[fedude]

I hate to start yet another thread over this networking nightmare, but I have reached the end of my rope. I've read all the threads on this in TH and the dozens of other places that try to help with this abomination.

My 2 PC's (PC-A and PC-B) are on a LAN connected via RJ45 a LinkSYS router connected to my cable modem. Both are running XP Pro. I have set up a local LAN and I can share files and printers across this home network. I can ping one from the other and I have tried to set up RDC so I can control one PC from the other and vise-versa.

Here is my quandry: From PC-B I can RDC to PC-A and gain control of it. Everything works fine. However, I cannot go from PC-A to access PC-B via RDC. Whenever I try I quickly get an error message "The connection was ended because of a network error. Please try connecting to the remote computer again. As I write this note on PC-A, I am listening to music stored on PC-B over the network.

- I have setup the system properties to enable the remote desktop on both PC's
- I have windows firewall running one each PC and both have RDC setup in the exceptions list.
- When I run "netstat -a" from PC-A I do not see it listening on port 3389, but when I do it from PC-B I do see it listening.
- I disabled the requirement to have a non-null password in the registry of both machines, but I still tried to RDC from an admin account that has a password. Still nothing from PC-A to PC-B.
- The Linksys router is set up to forward port 3389 to both PC-A and PC-B (whatever this means...)

And here's one more tidbit: From PC-A I can bring up a VPN and RDC to my PC at work. In this case RDC on PC-A works great. When I run netstat while this is hapenning, I do not see PC-A listening on 3389.

Any ideas??

 

[Codesmith]

You can try alternatives to get the same think done.

1) Use the free version of zone alarm instead of windows firewall, set it to medium security. For me it works better.

Or

2) Use VNC instead of RDC. It lest you pick the ports, it works despite what version of XP you are running (RDC doesn't like home) and you can even connect on the go via a web interface.

I use RealVNC and a free Dynamic IP service for remote connection.

Plus it lets you connect to a PC to log in (in case you have a box in your house with no keyboard and mouse and want to use a password).

Also you can see if its a router issue by swapping IP addresses on your boxes and see if the situation is reversed.

 

[lcdguy]

i agree with this. i always had trouble with getting the RDP thingy to work sometimes so i just went back to VNC.