I recently threw Linux on one of my Xboxes to use as a file server. Everything is set up on the Xbox end; it's using XDSL and has the VNC client set to start automatically. My networking knowledge isn't quite up to snuff, though. Right now I'm at a university, and I have a router connected to the line they provide me. The router is set up to use DHCP, but I figure it would be easier to remote in if the Xbox had a static IP address. I'm not sure if this is possible with my current setup, and Googling (admittedly not much) didn't really help. For a test run, I left it with a dynamic IP address, looked it up from my router, and tried remoting in. No dice. A friend told me I'd have to forward the port that VNC/the Xbox is using, and I haven't tried that yet. My main worry is how I'm going to remote in once I'm a few hundred miles away. My router's IP address and the one that my Xbox has are obviously very different. Does anyone have any ideas how I would go about setting this up? I'm a pretty big newbie to the networking end, but I'm pretty excited about having this all up and going. The remoting-in part is pretty much the last thing that's stopping me. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Your xbox has an INTERNAL IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.2). Your router has an address on the network (e.g. 192.168.0.1) but this isn't important - you need your router's EXTERNAL IP address (i.e. your online IP address) to access the box. You can find this via the router's setup pages, or go to www.whatismyip.com on a PC. As I said, you'll use this address to access your box. However, if you do that without setting it up, what you're doing is accessing your router. Your router will then go - yeah? whaddaya want? You have to TELL it that you're trying to access your xbox. That's where port forwarding comes in. I could tell you that the default ports for VNC are 5800 and 5900 TCP and UDP, but as that won't mean a thing to you, the best thing to do is use the following: www.portforward.com Find your router, click on it. Then go to VNC (or UltraVNC or whatever VNC client you're using) and follow the instructions. It should now work. Incidentally, to check the VNC is set up properly, you can use internal addresses, i.e. go to a PC that's on the network and access 192.168.0.2 via your VNC viewer (or in a browser, if you've set it to listen on that port, too). If you have a power cut when you're away, your xbox won't come back on. If the router decides to change internal IP addresses for some reason (it shouldn't) then you're screwed unless it points it at the device (MAC address) instead of IP or you have enabled remote access to the router. If your ISP changes your IP address every day or whatever, you're screwed unless your router will accept a dynamic DNS service, or you install software on a box at home in order to update a dynamic DNS service (whether you can get one to run on Linux, I'm not sure).
