Of course TeamViewer assumes you have the PC turned on, and as such is not much use for accessing a NAS or other device that TeamViewer or Remote Desktop don't run on.

Agreed, Andrew.

But there seems to be some uncertainty as to what asdlmax is trying to do; and youngsyp has put forward a somewhat similar suggestion to mine, including the need to have a local TeamViewer enabled device on and available.

I found the installation of TeamViewer over those four PCs relatively simple; and use it when travelling to extract data from our home Met Station, for onward transmission to Exeter, as and when appropriate.

Also, the appropriate parts of the OP's LAN would also have to powered up, so it seems likely that he may have a suitable PC to achieve the basic access; and that may already be active and available.

Alternatively, use a service like Dropbox to host a copy of your files on the internet.

In reply to a post by youngsyp:

What you need:

1. WAN/ public IP address of your router (where a static IP makes things much easier).
2. Forward TCP port 3389 on your router.

Possible, but every Tom, Chan and Sergei will then have a go at the open RDP port.

I have numerous port 3389 attacks every single day. It's closed on my firewall but attempting to connect to it will result in all traffic to the offending host being blocked even on ports which are normally open.

Another suggestion is to get a Raspberry Pi and set up an OpenVPN server on it and use that to connect through from the outside world. It can be left on all the time because of the low power consumption. You might even want to attach an external storage device to it for file sharing access.

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

Possible, but every Tom, Chan and Sergei will then have a go at the open RDP port.

I have numerous port 3389 attacks every single day. It's closed on my firewall but attempting to connect to it will result in all traffic to the offending host being blocked even on ports which are normally open.

Yes you're correct, it is possible, that's why I suggested it.

Re the attacks due to the open port; any potential hacker would need to know your public IP address and that your 3389 port is open along with deciding you have anything worth sifting through on you LAN. Quite unlikely in reality. If you have multiple attacks as you suggest, I'd suggest you have a much bigger issue to worry about!

Re TeamViewer; it does work very well as eckiedoo suggests. I use it from my Android tablet and Android phone if I don't have a device capable of RDP.

Having the target device powered up is really a non-issue. I never leave my server running, but use it in a 'on demand' fashion. I use a wake on WAN tool that I downloaded from the Windows store on my Win 8 tablet to wake the server as and when. Or an app called WOL - wake on LAN on my Android devices. Again, you will need to open up the an appropriate port on your router and enable WOL on the target's NIC but, it's extremely simple to do and you only need to do it once.

As has been suggested, we don't have a full understanding of what the OP is trying to achieve though.

Paul

Edited by deleted (Thu 14-Aug-14 22:35:00)

In reply to a post by youngsyp:

Re the attacks due to the open port; any potential hacker would need to know your public IP address and that your 3389 port is open along with deciding you have anything worth sifting through on you LAN. Quite unlikely in reality. If you have multiple attacks as you suggest, I'd suggest you have a much bigger issue to worry about!

3389, as a well known service port, is one of the ports probed as standard by network scanners.

An obvious solution is static NAPT on the router though, NAT say port 63389 externally to 3389 internally.

I neglected to mention, a stipulation of the access via RDP is a username and password and user specific access, to the target machine, needs to be granted. Yet more details a potential attacker would need to know...

Paul

If you want to access your files from anywhere. I second the advice already given. Get dropbox or Google drive.

Save your files to dropbox, let them upload. Then you can access them anywhere by logging in at www.dropbox.com or alternatively installing the dropbox software on all of your laptops, and get the dropbox app on any mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, samsung galaxy phones etc.

Obviously you cannot save EVERYTHING to dropbox or google drive, as there are space restrictions. BUT you can save most of your key work etc.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Obviously you cannot save EVERYTHING to dropbox or google drive, as there are space restrictions. BUT you can save most of your key work etc.

Microsoft OneDrive works in the same way, with 15GB free space (same as Google Drive) but if you have an Office 365 subscription each user gets 1TB free OneDrive space.

In reply to a post by youngsyp:

Re the attacks due to the open port; any potential hacker would need to know your public IP address and that your 3389 port is open along with deciding you have anything worth sifting through on you LAN. Quite unlikely in reality. If you have multiple attacks as you suggest, I'd suggest you have a much bigger issue to worry about!

The attacker doesn't need to know any address and it doesn't matter whether you are on a static or dynamic address. They just do an address space scan and see which addresses give any sort of response. Those which respond are then probed further with scans against commonly vulnerable services. Services which are identified as running are then targeted - often with brute force password attacks or traffic designed to exploit a specific vulnerability.

It all happens very, very quickly and entirely without human intervention. The traffic I have described is perfectly normal and has been for years. You may not see very much of it if whatever firewall system you use is too basic and doesn't have comprehensive reporting and logging.

I've run a static routed address block since 1999 when I first had a leased line installed at home. Since then I've run dedicated enterprise grade hardware firewalls configured for automatic IDS/IPS and Cisco routers.

I review the firewall and router configurations very regularly and make changes in response to new threats.

I'm fairly sure I don't have a huge amount to worry about. Not at the moment.