How to set up Remote Desktop step by step

Having remote desktop set up is like carrying your home computer with you wherever you go as long as you can access internet. You could run your favorite program installed on your computer or you could use your familiar setting at home. There are various ways of setting up a remote desktop as well as different remote OS: Macintosh, Windows and Linux. For me, I will use the most native way to set up my remote desktop; that is, with Windows’ built-in remote desktop program. There are a couple of benefits using Windows’ native remote desktop:

1. By default, Windows system has Remote Desktop Connection installed. Windows is still the most popular system, the chance of being able to use the pre-installed Remote Desktop client software outside is very high.
2. It’s Microsoft’s own Remote Desktop program and it should work the best for Windows system.
3. There are tons third party Remote Desktop Client Software that will be compatible with Microsoft Remote Desktop server.
4. There are Remote Desktop Connection software available for Macintosh and Linux users to make connection with a Windows-based remote server.

Of course, there are tons of good Remote Desktop software out there like RealVNC, LogMeIn and TeamViewer, but I still like to use Windows native remote desktop just because most of the time I don’t need to install new software in order to make the connection. For example, when I am at school, there are thousands of PC in the computer lab and I don’t have permission to install any 3rd party software on them; however, since Remote Desktop Connection is one of the utilities came with default Windows setup, I could use it right there.

Alright, there are really three main steps for you to do: Set up Remote Server, Configure your router, and set up your Remote Client.

1. Setting up Remote Server

The Windows OS I am going to use is Windows 7 (I was using Windows XP Professional, but seems like Windows 7 provides better features.).

Right click “Computer“, then you will see the following menu on the left panel:

Choose “Remote settings“, and the following window will pop up:

The default setting is “Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure)“, and I would like to keep it like that because I am not sure what version of Remote Desktop I will be using when I am not with my own computers.

Once you done that, you can simply click on “Select Users” and choose the users from the list to authorize them to control the system remotely. If you have already known how to use a remote desktop client software, you can actually try it out. Bring up CMD (Search “CMD” after clicked on “Start”) and type in “ipconfig“, you will be able to see your IPv4 address:

This is your internal address; if you have another computer running on the same network. Type in the IP address into the address field as well as your user name and password. If you can make the connection, that means your remote desktop is running well; the next thing we need to do is just to re-route the request from outside of your home correctly to the remote desktop.

2. Setting up your Remote Desktop client

There is really not much to do in this step. You can simply find compatible software and install it. For PC users, by default, Remote Desktop Connection is already installed. You should be able to see it when you navigate to “Start–>All Programs–>Accessories”:

For Mac users, you can download it from Microsoft’s official site.

3. Setting up router/gateway

For most of the people, I assume you will have a router at home especially when you have more than one computers. When the Remote Desktop software tries to make the connection from outside, it will send request through port 3389. However, the first thing it will hit is the router; but the router doesn’t know what it should do with the data going through port 3389 and will simply return nothing.

Now let me first explain how does the traffic is like:

Let’s say, you are using your laptop outside of your home, you launch up your Remote Desktop and try to connect your remote server. When request is sent by the software (assume to the IP 202.11.22.33), then the router receives it, and will redirect the request the the appropriate computer for handling the data. The correct one is the one having IP 192.168.1.110.

How do we do this? As different users have different router, I will not explain in detail, but what you need to do is to enable virtual server function and redirect all data through port 3389 to the port 3389 on your remote desktop:

Having said that, you will need your external IP address to connect back to your home server. How do you know your external IP address? (Note: 192.168.1.110 is your internal address; the one we assume 202.11.22.33 is your external IP address.) You can visit What Is My Ip Address and you will know it.

You might not notice it, but your IP address could change from time to time unless you have a static address from your ISP (Internet Service Provider). What if you try to connect to your remote server but the IP address has already been changed? Now we need Dynamic DNS.

There are a couple Dynamic DNS service out there, but No-IP is always my favorite. What they can do for you is to give you a free sub-domain like yourDomainName.hopto.org. You can download the client and launch it up your user name. The software will automatically refresh the latest IP of your remote desktop to the sub-domain name. Now, typing yourDomainName.hopto.org is the same as typing 202.11.22.33.

Post Note:

I know there are tons of tutorial on setting up remote desktop, but I still want to write up my own. If you would like to simplify the whole process, I really recommend LogMeIn or TeamViewer as you don’t really need to set up the router (I have to admit that’s a difficult part for most of the users new to port forwarding).