Looking for a solution

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nick Gage
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Nick Gage

Hi All,

I have an interesting problem that I am trying to solve and I am hoping that
someone can point me in a direction.

I currently have 200+ Windows XP embedded systems out in the field. These
units are tasked with retrieving files from my company via a custom service
that we wrote. The unit then displays these files via a webserver. All
these units are behind firewalls that we have no control over. Some of
these unit are behind proxy servers that we have no control over.

Here's my problem. I need a way that I can remotely diagnose and/or control
these units over the internet. Be it being able to get into a telnet
session or remote desktop. Given that we do not have any control or say
about firewalls or proxy servers, the unit in the field is going to have to
be able to establish some kind of a connection to our system and then allow
us to take control of that connection to do what we need to do.

If anyone knows of anything like this or has any suggestions, they would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Nick Gage MCSE NT4 & Windows 2000
 
Hi Nick, we've done something very similar for one of our clients.

If you're allowed to make outbound connections from each server through the
firewalls/proxys then you can configure the servers to dial a VPN connection
back to your site either on demand (via your service) or at a scheduled
time. Once the server connects to your VPN server they are then assigned an
IP address which you can use to mange the remote server via the VPN
connection by any method you like (TS, Telnet or anything else which runs
over IP and can be installed on your servers). You will have to be clever
with WINS and DNS to get the local PCs to resolve the remote servers by name
or you can assign each remote server a fixed IP address and handle it that
way. You should probably also create unique user accounts for each remote
server so that you can block them if they become compromised.

If anyone's got any comments then it's all up for discussion.

Hope this helps,
Edmund
 
You may consider establish VPN connection from the xp client to your server,
once vpn is established, they are like in LAN, so you can take control of
the clients.
 
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