Remote Access To Eircom Router

WILKEL

hope this is the place to be asking- we have a customer (based in the uk) at work who has installed two ovens in our plant ( with their own ip addresses) and i was wondering how to give them access to a eircom bb router (netopia 2247NWG)
so as they can access and download information ( in a secure way) from the two ovens.
they sent over a pre configured router but i cannot get it to work and none of their staff are good at this stuff.
i have the eircom router set up on a seperate adsl line ( dedicated to this project) so nothing that i do will affect our own network.
any ideas would be appriciated.

koloughlin

What kind of access do they need to have to the ovens? If the ovens had built-in ssh servers then you could probably just set up port forwarding on the router to the 2 ovens. SSH is a secure encrypted protocol so it's safe to do that. If on the other hand the two ovens are run by windows boxes and the remote access will be done using something like telnet or windows remote desktop then you'll need to tunnel those protocols through a vpn or possibly through ssh. Here's an example of tunneling remote desktop protocol through ssh http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html.

Anyway if you can respond with how you want to connect to the ovens that might help make suggestions on the best approach.

WILKEL

koloughlin wrote:

What kind of access do they need to have to the ovens? If the ovens had built-in ssh servers then you could probably just set up port forwarding on the router to the 2 ovens. SSH is a secure encrypted protocol so it's safe to do that. If on the other hand the two ovens are run by windows boxes and the remote access will be done using something like telnet or windows remote desktop then you'll need to tunnel those protocols through a vpn or possibly through ssh. Here's an example of tunneling remote desktop protocol through ssh http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html.

Anyway if you can respond with how you want to connect to the ovens that might help make suggestions on the best approach.

Thanks for your reply koloughlin,
the guy says he wants to set up a standard microsoft vpn to access the ovens and a laptop that he has on site here using microsoft remote desktop ( if that makes any sense). the ovens have eurotherm hardware that we can connect if we can get him to access the router.

Thanks again

koloughlin

I presume then that it's going to be a PPTP VPN? Personally I don't have experience with this to be honest. A very quick google threw out this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/vpn/default.mspx. Looks like there's a bunch of stuff there on how to set up the VPN. This link http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/N100495.asp suggests that you'd need to port forward port 1723 from your adsl router to the laptop they provided. If you search this link http://www.netopia.com/support/hardware/manuals/SoftwareUserGuideV761-Clsc.pdf you might have to set up a "Custom Flow" to allow the PPTP traffic to enter from outside.

So, I guess your architecture is that you run the microsoft vpn server on the laptop they provide. On your ADSL router configure port forwarding (sometimes called a pinhole) to forward tcp port 1723 to the laptop. You'll need to set the laptop up with a static IP so that the port forwarding doesn't get messed up by DHCP assigning the laptop a new IP address. You'll also need a static external IP from your DSL provider, or you'll need to use a Dynamic DNS service like one from http://www.dyndns.com/. Then you can either give the folks in the UK your fixed external IP, or you can give them your dynamic dns entry.

And there are probably other things that need to be done. Hopefully someone out there has already gone through this process