Alright, here's the tale. I want to be able to access all of my computers from a remote location. One of the locations I want to access my computers from is behind a firewall and I can only make outgoing connections through port 8092.

Up until recently, that wasn't a problem. I had one computer (running XPee), so I slapped a static IP on it and forwarded 8092 and all was well...except that in some places, I'm looking at the monitor on resolutions as low as 1024x768, so my desktop looks like crap.

Up until now, I've been VNC'ing into my desktop, and then from there VNC'ing into my Linux laptop...this is painfully laggy, and I'd like to be able to directly VNC into the laptop.

I'm using TightVNC on the laptop, and I can't seem to find any configuration files to make it listen on port 8092. Theoretically, though, I could just forward port 8092 on the router to port 5901 (5900?) on my laptop's static IP and that would work. That's my next plan, because all in all, accessing a gaming box remotely over VNC isn't terribly useful, but accessing my Linux box is.

Anybody have any good ideas (or links to appropriate HOWTOS) on how I can do some sort of setup that lets me access both machines through the external port 8092?

I think port 22 is open, so I could SSH into my Linux box, but I don't think I can run X through SSH...and I've never managed to connect from a Windows machine to my Linux box. (I've only tried PuTTY)

Try "googling" for "X Windows", "SSH', "VNC" and the like - there are many alternatives.

Here's a good example on how to securely use X windows through SSH:
http://p25ext.lanl.gov/ssh/xwindows.html

Here's another:
http://please.rutgers.edu/show/howto...WindowsViaSSH/

And another (this one emphasizes SSH over local VNC, vs. SSH over X on your PC):
http://www.trekweb.com/~jasonb/articles/vnc_ssh.shtml

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Well, the last one looked promising, but it assumes PuTTY works out of the box. I have a DynDNS link pointing to my IP address, and I can't even connect, whether I use my.url or my.url:22, not even to authenticate. Getting a command-line connection would be a great start, but it's a no go so far. Maybe port 22 isn't open after all? Is there a way to make sshd listen on a different port? I don't have apache running, so I could always use port 80.

I still can't find a way to make TightVNC listen on any port other than 59xx, and my router won't let me forward port 8092 (externally) to 192.168.x.y:???? after all (I was looking at port ranges, not what internal ports are being reached.

Just one quick point.... If you are using VNC over the Internet without an SSH tunnel, you really want to stop doing that. VNC transmits everything in clear text, making it that much easier to crack your boxen.

Yes, you just have to edit the Port line in your sshd_config file. Sshd will listen to any port you want. In fact if you have multiple machines behind your router that you want to connect to, you will need to change this since most routers have no way to forward a single port to multiple machines.
I'm guessing that you don't have Putty configured correctly, or that port 22 isn't being forwarded. Putty is a little weird, but by entering in your dnydns name, it should get you at least an SSH connection. I do this all the time using my no-ip.com address. If you're not getting a connection, try using the WAN IP address. If that works, then your dyndns entry is wrong. If it doesn't work, that suggests port 22 isn't being forwarded. Another possiblilty is that the remote box has a firewall blocking port 22 traffic or that sshd isn't running.

Finally, you might want to check out FreeNX. I haven't used it but I have seen a number of threads around here on it. It is supposedly faster than VNC, so it might be a better solution if speed is killing you.