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A doozy: Routing/NAT/DNS question

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by ehoffman

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okay, here we go. I am lost and not sure this is possible. Client wants to use Remote Desktop Web Connections from outside the office which connect to XP Pro machines with the Wed Connection software installed. We have a firewall, with 3389 and 80 open. An external IP routes to the Windows 2003 SBS internal IP right now though (NAT). Is it possible, somehow, to put the machine names in external DNS so it points to the public IP address, which then resolves to the server local IP right now...but somehow make that request reroute to the internal IP of the client machine once that request has reached that internal server...I setup internal DNS to reflect the client machine names as well, but this doesn't seem correct in my mind or maybe even possible. Any ideas?

5 replies

by mbolmeier

There's no way to have your internal DNS names be public without actually acquiring (buying) them, but I see a couple of other things you could do.

1) Just have your client use the public IP address instead of the name.

2) Edit the hosts file (%systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) and manually add the IPs and names. That would only work if your client used the same machine all the time, like a laptop.

3) Setup your own public DNS server and have it point to the right places, making sure the client has that server as his primary DNS server.

Hope that helps.

by ehoffman

but the issue is if he uses public ip, it only resolves to the server address, not a client machine on the network...

the hosts would maybe work though you think? I'm not sure how...cause yes each desktop is the same all the time in terms of IP and name.

by cg it

hummm have you got ISA server running on that Small Business Server network? {cringe} is Active Directory running?

Ummm I've never tried remote desktop from a remote access client into a domain network to a workstation on the network. I don't think the domain controller would allow unauthorized remote access in but if one could enable remote desktop on their workstation and poof one of their friends could remotely connect and browse around , man what a security hole.

by ehoffman

we have found a way to securely make this happen in a similar fashion but not directly the same, and this thought ended up being a dead end. It was a nice thought, but oh well. Answer is no this cannot work in this manner at this time.

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