I'm attempting to connect to my mother's PC so I can find and clean up the mess my neice has made of the machine. Both machines (mine and my mother's) are Windows XP Pro SP2, the host (mother's PC) was configured to permit remote control via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and the only firewall running the machine is the native Windows Firewall. When I try to connect from a client (my PC in this case), the connection is never successful, as if the host were offline. I can ping the host so I know the hardware is up, and my mother says the OS is up and running.
To trouble shoot, I put my PC outside my firewall and tried again, no success so I ran a plain trace route from the client to the host and the results look something like this:
1. BARAD-DUR (client)
2. KALI-MA (my DSL modem)
3. DAVE (first hop at my ISP)
.\
. various backbones
./
14. Comcast device
15. ----------------
16. CHALLENGE1 (host)
Hop 15 never IDs itself either by name or IP address, but I suspect that its my mother's cable/telephony modem. So I have connectivity to the host. When I use a unix box to run a trace route probing port 3389 (RDP), I can get as far as hop 14, then hop 15 never responds and the trace eventually times out. I can successfully run the same trace probing port 3389 back to my client from work as well as to one of my servers inside my firewall, so that tell me the connection in to my network is clear.
So at this point I'm looking at whats sitting at hop 15 as the guilty party thats blocking the RDP connection attempts, and considering hop 15 is the cable modem on the hosts end, at least until I can get a trace out from the host to me.
Am I overlooking anything in your experience? I've not yet had a chance to check the Windows firewall exclusion settings, but thats on the list.
