Getting back in touch w/ my geek self of late, I have been messing around w/ the DVD jukebox that I have setup. Since I am planning to have the PC on all day, I thought I might as well have it be a media server or a ftp server. Well, the first thing I did was get file sharing setup on it. Back to the topic of the post, I finally figured out why I couldn't get file sharing setup on my laptop back then. I have Win XP home edition on my laptop, which doesn't support Win XP pro file sharing w/ ACL and NTFS permissions, only simple file sharing ala 98/ME!!!
So I got Win XP pro and wipe cleaned my laptop and threw that on. It is amazing how much quicker windows installs nowadays compare to back then on win 98. It took about 40 minutes. I spend another 20 minutes dropping all the drivers back in. But I was really surprise I didn't have any driver issues. Dell really does a good job of keeping all their drivers available to d/l from their site. I know when I had to wipe clean one of my friend's Toshiba laptop several years ago, I couldn't find the SD card reader driver at all.
Anyway, I was able to setup file sharing no problem. Then I messed around w/ several other things. The first thing I got was remote desktop working from my laptop into my mce htpc. That is nice. Now I don't have to squint anymore when I have to do some modifications in drivers. Too bad you can't play videos via remote desktop on the media center. That would have been really nice.
So the next thing I setup was No-IP. No-IP lets me connect a host name to my dynamic IP address (Verizon), so that I can connect to my PCs via the host name instead of the IP address. Verizon's DSL IP address really doesn't change too often, only when I turn off the modem or get disconnected, so it's not too bad. But it's still a whole lot easier to remember a host name then an IP address.
So I got that setup, and had to play around w/ the port settings on my router to get remote desktop via the web to work. I thought that remote desktop uses UDP port 3389. In fact, it uses TCP port 3389 to connect. But once I changed that, it was smooth sailing.
Then I tried the VPN setup. Like I said in my previous post nearly 1 1/2 yr ago, I was able to get my VPN to work. But now for some reason, I can't get it to work anymore. I should really try to post instructions on how I got it to work on here so I can always google it back later. I opened all the proper ports, port forwarded them correctly to my MCE PC, but it doesn't detect any inbounding connection at all. Oh well, I gotta spend more time on this.
I was reading up online yesterday that remote desktop doesn't require a PC that have remote desktop client to work. I can even access it via a web page if I have the IIS server setup. That is also something I would really like to try. Add that, FTP, and soon I might have my lights controlled remotely, just like that guy that had his Xmas lights controls hooked up to his webpage (that was eventually discovered to be a hoax).
