Using Microsoft RDP In Small Business environments

Microsoft RDP is a feature of Microsoft Windows operating systems that allows someone to work remotely on a computer. E 'stands for Remote Desktop Protocol. So next time you get to a cocktail party you will know what to respond.

Remote Desktop Protocol is used in many corporate environments, to enable employees to access their office computers remotely. The technology is being rapidly adopted by small businesses, as well as provides a practical, convenient and secure access to corporate documents or e-mail from your home computer of a person.

Many small companies with small and medium computer networks typically have a computer network architecture that involves a broadband router that shares the Internet connection to the Internet company with a number of networked computers. This type of broadband routers typically also combines the functionality of routers with some kind of firewall protection.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with a configuration of the computer network of this nature, some small businesses are facing the challenge of making the most of a company computer remotely accessible via Microsoft RDP. This is due to the fact that the broadband devices connection sharing are generally configured to have the IP address of a particular computer network as DMZ. DMZ stands for Demilitarized Zone, which means that all incoming network traffic from the outside world (Internet) has been transmitted to the computer. That the computer is no longer protected by the firewall, in fact, that the computer is in itself when it comes to protection against the dangers of the Internet.

A convenient side effect of this situation is that when someone tries to access the company's computer network from home via Microsoft RDP, RDP router forwards the request to the computer in the DMZ and BINGO, the computer in the DMZ can be accessed remotely from home.

While this configuration is a perfectly workable in terms of making office documents or mail from home, this is definitely not the best way to go about it. Do not just let the computer company that seems to be totally protected from the DMZ firewall against malicious attacks, is also a single computer accessible via RDP.

A better way to go about it would be to reconfigure the router and disable the DMZ and then look for a function that is called port forwarding. Port forwarding allows you to forward incoming network traffic to a certain IP address at PORT. Microsoft RDP operates over TCP / IP 3389 by default, so any ip address to configure the router to forward incoming traffic to port 3389, will be the ipaddress of the computer that will be accessible via RDP from a remote location.

The interesting part is that not only that computers remain protected by the firewall to all incoming traffic, which will also let you set up other computers so that they are accessible from the outside world. You see, there is a registry setting in Windows that allows you to define the port that the computer should be listening for incoming RDP requests. When you change the RDP listening port on a second computer to port number 3390, will be able to access your computer from home, by specifying the port number in the RDP client. You must make sure though that you do not forget to set up port forwarding on port 3390 in the broadband router to the IP address of this second computer.

The setting of the registry that defines the RDP listening port in Windows is as follows:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminal ServerWinStationsRDP-Tcp ...