Hello, I have just installed Windows Server 2003 and through IIS i have installed TS, so that user connected through LAN can access my server through http://COMPUTERNAME/tsweb, and log in with their username and access their own files. Now I don't know how to go from here to actually making it possible for me to connect to the server from home or another location that is not connected through LAN. Any ideas on how to do so? I am thinking I need to use my IP somehow, but I can't find the next step for connecting from an external location.

I assume you have a firewall/router in front of the server? You need to forward port 80 and 3389 to the server. Then you need to connect using either the public ip addy or your domain name if that name is registered on the internet to the right IP. "Milk was a bad choice!"

Just to flesh out heropsycho's comments: first you will need to get a public, registered IP address from your I.S.P. Due to a lack of available IP addresses, almost all LAN's use private addresses which do not work on the Internet. So you will pay to get 1 address which is valid everywhere on the Internet, and then use a TCP/IP function called Network Address Translation to share that single valid IP address with all the internal, externally invalid IP addresses. If you have been sharing an Internet connection through a router or another server, this will already have been happening, but without the registered, permanent public IP address. With a publically valid IP address you can contact that address (or its DNS name, e.g. www.sales.acme.com) from anywhere on the Internet. But it is not only the IP address which gets contacted, it is a port too. The port is really a code for a particular program. FOr example, port 110 is POP3 e-mail. When computers on the Internet get to the router or server which has the public IP address (which will be on the border of your LAN), that router or server will either accept the traffic on that port for itself, or forward it on to another server. If you want it forwarded on (e.g. to an internal webserver) then you need to set up port forwarding. Hope this helps, and sorry if I have gone over basic stuff which you already know. "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - BILL CLINTON

Some good info there, but I have to disagree with: Due to a lack of available IP addresses, almost all LAN's use private addresses which do not work on the Internet. I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, but if you mean ISPs issue private addresses because of a lack of public addresses, you're crazy :-) Possible ip address combos: 4,294,967,296 Remove 16,777,216 for 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 Remove 1,048,576 for 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 Remove 65,536 for 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 Remove 65,536 for 169.254.0.0 -169.254.255.255 And you're left with: 4,277,075,968. That's plenty of addresses to go around until two out of 3 men, women, and children in the entire world log on to the internet simultaneously. In my experience, about half of ISPs give you a public IP address, although not necessarily static. Mine is public and seems to stick for several months at a time. If you don't want to incur the cost of a static IP address but your address is public, you can look into a service like no-ip.com. Good luck, -SN

"if you mean ISPs issue private addresses because of a lack of public addresses, you're crazy" Actually, SN, some ISP's in fact ARE issuing private IP's. "Possible ip address combos: 4,294,967,296 Remove 16,777,216 for 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 Remove 1,048,576 for 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 Remove 65,536 for 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 Remove 65,536 for 169.254.0.0 -169.254.255.255" Oversimplistic. You must remove broadcast addresses, network addresses, addresses used by routers, multicast addresses, other special reserved addresses. "Milk was a bad choice!"

Actually, SN, some ISP's in fact ARE issuing private IP's. I'm not disputing the fact that some ISPs issue private IP addresses (As I thought was clear in my first post...) My own did so until recently. I'm disputing that the reason they're doing so is a lack of public IP addresses. "Oversimplistic. You must remove broadcast addresses, network addresses, addresses used by routers, multicast addresses, other special reserved addresses." I also left out servers, and the fact that ISPs are each limited to a specific subset of IP addresses. But none of that changes the point that there are plenty of IP addresses to go around. I'd speculate that ISPs likely assign private addresses just to save money on infrastructure (there may be other reasons too, but I'm not familiar enough with the function of ISPs to hazard a guess.) -SN