WHS - Remote Access

Matt · **20th November 2007, 12:28 PM**

Hi all,

Just a quick heads up on a problem I encountered with WHS that had me scatching my head for a while.

Been playing with WHS since the betas, did the upgrade to the full OEM version over the weekend and all the way along I've never been able to get remote access from the net to the WHS box working. I'd never really spent anytime on it, simply put it down to an incompatibility between WHS and my router and hopefully it'd be right with RTM code or a router firmware update... anyhoo..

Much to my dismay after loading the final product I still couldn't access the server remotely.

So started digging.... could access it from the LAN, port forwards were setup in the router, still couldn't get it working, I have other succesful port forwards setup for some other applications I run.. what am I missing...

Checked out the whirpool forum for iiNet and low an behold I find the solution.. they're blocking inbound connections on ports 25, 80, 135, 139, 443 and 445. Never realised they did this. Good thing is iiNet give you the ability to turn off the blocking in the toolbox so now remote access is working

Be aware you're also able to change the listening ports of WHS as well, so if your ISP does block ports and you don't have the ability to turn the port blocking off like iiNet does your going to have to get your hands dirty making some changes.

Details on how to do it can be found here.

Cheers,

Matt.

GlenR · **20th November 2007, 12:39 PM**

Great to hear a success story Matt. I really was impressed with WHS when I tried it.

Do you stream your video/music/pictures from your WHS to your VMC? If so did you have to go gigabit or did 100M work OK?

Matt · **20th November 2007, 01:33 PM**

I'm loving the ease of use of WHS and the fact it backs up all my precious photos as well as system partitions of my home PC's for easy recovery.

Only got a 320Gb drive in my VMC box now and that's exclusively for TV recordings, all my other content is on the WHS box.

Been lucky enough to have recently built a house (4 years ago) so it's completely wired up with g/bit to all points in the house so it's 'stream city' to VMC and the Xbox360

Cheers,

Matt.

KlinkEYE · **20th November 2007, 02:42 PM**

You may wish to change the port that remote desktop runs on. Its a commonly scanned port.

Although if you are really security concious you could always just run Hamachi (not sure if it runs on WHS - it should) and you no longer have any open ports on your router.

Matt · **20th November 2007, 03:17 PM**

Good point, unfortunately that's not one of the ports you can change otherwise you break RDP on WHS.

Good news is WHS doesn't use the standard RDP port (3389), it uses port 4425 which is used as an RDP gateway. I've just tried a quick scan of my server at home and the port is closed so I'm guessing it's dynamically opened by the server when the request to do RDP is intiated. Will have to do some more testing to confirm.

Cheers,

Matt.

coma · **20th November 2007, 05:45 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by GlenR

Do you stream your video/music/pictures from your WHS to your VMC? If so did you have to go gigabit or did 100M work OK?

I normally have gigabit but due to a faulty switch have reverted to 100mb for the last week or so while i wait for a replacement from dlink.
I stream dvd's from whs and it works great - didnt notice any difference when on 100mb
Maybe takes a bit longer to load cover art - but no biggie.
Coma.