Okay, So I have a home PC and a brand new Nokia n800 :-), and I want to access the PC (windows, for work) via vnc. I installed tightvnc and gave it a password, allowed in incoming connections, gave it permissions to the network (actually turned off the firewall while debugging), and set up my home router to forward every port between 5800 and 5915 to that PC.

When I try to log in via the vncviewer on the n800 with the local (192.168.x.x) IP address, it works just fine. But when I try it with the IP I get from whatismyip.com, even from the neighbor's internet, I get nothing.

Any ideas what could be wrong? I thought if you forwarded the ports, you'd be okay.

Now I tried further to set up what my router calls a DMZ. Essentially, it forwards all the ports to that laptop, but still no luck.

Windows XP SP2 does have a software firewall. You might want to check if the port is closed. Only open the port in the router that VNC uses.

The WinXP firewall is off as well, darn.

Is there any chance that the whatismyip.com IP address is not correct? I don't use any proxies, but maybe my ISP is on my behalf? My router claims that the IP address we are surfing with is something else, but since it starts with 192.168, I'm assuming that it's either wrong or I misinterpreted what it was saying.

The check at gotomyvnc reports that there is no vnc running from my pc. I get the same behavior with ultravnc.

You could simply look at your routers config page and see what its IP address is. On thing to check for is if you have a real internet address or a private address.

Well, I tried that, and it gave me that IP starting with 192.168, so that can't be right. Could it be my ISP preventing me from doing this?

The 192.168.X.X is a local address. You need to open the port in the router, 5900 if the daemon is running. Try doing a on your windows box or and see what comes up, your IP should be #2.

Hope this helps.

Some ISPs, usually for DSL, don't give you a real IP because you are behind their NAT router, and they are serving several customers per IP address. If you read the correct IP address (WAN input on the Router), then you can't initiate connections to the router from the internet.