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Vance Hunt has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.

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Icon of Vance HuntFriday, December 12, 2008
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By Vance Hunt
 
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Q: I have three computers at home, all connected to a small router so I can share my internet connection.  I would like to be able to reach all three of my computers via Remote Desktop from outside my home.  How do I do this?
 
A: First, you will need to setup your environment.  We'll start by enabling a connection to just one of your computers - pick one, then follow the instructions in this article.

Next, we'll need to do a little reconfiguration of the Remote Desktop (RD) on your other two.  On each of the remaining computers, open the registry and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp

Next, double client the value/data pair called PortNumber and change that to something new, say 3390 for one and 3391 for the other.  Close the registry.  Next, assign those two computers static IP addresses like you did the first computer, then reboot.  Go back into your router and forward those ports to the assigned computers, and you're good to go.

When connecting to computers with reassigned RD ports, instead of just specifying the name or IP of the computer, you need to also include the new port.  So, for example, if your computer is named MYCOMPUTER and you reset RD's port to 3390, you would then reference that computer as MYCOMPUTER:3390 when attempting to connect.

You can read all the extra information on reconfiguring RD in MS KB 304304 and 306759.



Q: I recently was transferred from my companies regional office to a smaller satellite.  I still perform my original job, but I have found that the amounts of data I need to transfer (in spurts, not continuously) consumes too much of the satellite's bandwidth to be done during business hours.  This leaves me with having to get in very early, stay late, or even come in on weekends to start the transfer of data.  My wife would prefer I not.  Is there ways to transfer data that take into consideration bandwidth and allow control so as not to hog?
 
A: I have a simple and a complicated answer for you.  I'll start with the complicated one.

Microsoft BITS.  Straight from Microsoft's own web site: "Use Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to transfer files asynchronously between a client and a server. There are three types of transfer jobs. A download job downloads files to the client, an upload job uploads a file to the server, and an upload-reply job uploads a file to the server and receives a reply file from the server application".  Nutshelled, use your local and remote IIS clients to trickle data with a low priority mostly during idle times resulting in the ability to send large amounts of data anytime with no disruption.  It even has the benefit of allowing interruptions in transfer, starting back up at the leave-off place when available.  If you have a lot of data to transfer all the time, and you have the resources and time to set this up, it might be a good thing.  There are command line utilities you can use to launch the batch transfers.  It sounds good, but it also sounds like a lot of work.  I haven't done it - I've looked into it, but haven't done it.

The simple answer is again from Microsoft, and I've mentioned it enough on my site that I should be getting a commission on use: Robocopy.  Available from many of the Windows Resource Kits and Admin Tools as well as being completely free, this utility solves so many of the worlds needs I'm always surprised that it hasn't reached a higher level of fandom.  Within the documentation you will find that the utility allows a throttling of sorts using the /ipg:[ms] switch.  What this means is that after each 64 bit chunk of data that Robocopy pushes during the copy, it will pause the specified number of milliseconds.  This has the end result of allowing large and continuous data transfers during normal business hour without completely shutting down the network.  Unlike BITS, this I do use a lot - I'm in the habit of transferring large WIM images  (3 to 5 GB) over the WAN during business hours, and without the throttling, I'd be arch-enemy #1.  It also has the added benefit of not requiring any setup or additional files to work, so is most likely your best bet.




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