Marko Vojinovic wrote:
Sorry for an off topic post, but a lot of you folks are sysadmins here or there, and just might have a suggestion... ;-)
I have a WinXP machine that is to be unattended for a period of 3 years (yes, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but still...). What I need is remote access to it to perform regular system maintenance, virus cleanups, occasional software installations, reboots, config changes, etc.
Of course, rdesktop would do it, or vnc server or something else. The problem is that this machine is behind a NAT, and I cannot access it remotely from outside (and I need access from whereever on the planet I may happen to be).
Basically, I need to setup some type of ssh tunnelling from XP (machine A) to my static-IP-24/7-high-bandwidth-CentOS server (machine B) and then further to my laptop (machine C, Fedora 10) located elsewhere (possibly behind another NAT, I can't know in advance). I have root access for all three machines (A, B and C). Of course, all three are on different LANs.
However, I have never done anything like this before, so I wonder what is the best method of creating such a setup?
Set up an openvpn tunnel from the remote unattended machine to the centos box. If you can set up port-forwarding on it's NAT router, you may be able to originate this connection either way. If you can't, use a keep-alive setting on the natted side to make sure the connection stays active. Then you can either do the same on the laptop with appropriate routing or you can run freenx on the Centos server and connect to it with the nomachine NX client on the laptop. In the latter scenario you would run rdesktop or vncviewer on the Centos server but the display would be on the laptop.