VNC Mac help

[Peter Korsten]

Ron West schreef:

>> telnet: connect to address 192.168.1.103: Operation timed out
>> telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
> 
> this is what happened - it timed out.

Does the IP address you're trying to telnet to start with '192.168.' or 
with '10.'? Those are non-routable IP addresses and they only work for 
your own network. For instance, my IP address at work is 192.168.8.49, 
but that only makes sense within the company.

> i figured it was a problem with the port. i need to figure out how to
> open that port to let VNC through.

You'd have to do that on your mother's router. That's not going to be easy.

> i just tried it with myself. it timed out when using my "real" IP
> address but it worked when i used my router IP. does that sound
> normal?

What do you mean with 'my "real" IP address? Your IP address for the 
outside world is the one of your router; surf to http://a.b.c.d/ where 
a.b.c.d is the internal (in other words, starting with '10.' or 
'192.168.') IP address of your router. If you don't know the internal IP 
address of your router, then in a terminal, type 'netstat -rn' and look 
at the IP address of 'default', that's the one. (Providing that Mac OS X 
behaves like Unix.)

Probably, though, your mother's router is configured not to accept 
connections from the internet (for very good reasons!) and you'd have to 
open that yourself, because she won't manage from what I gather. If you 
do so, make sure that (a) you have a fixed IP address and (b) you only 
open port 5900 to that fixed IP address.

- Peter