Port Forwarding & Remote Managament (ARD)

[jderosa3]

I am in charge of a small network at my place of work and I have it setup quite well for our needs. However I do have a question about port forwarding and remote system management with Apple Remote Desktop. While this is the software I use - I feel that my question should be general enough to answer here.

Our office is setup with the following:

• Verizon FIOS (Static IP)
• Dlink DIR-655 Router (Wireless)
• 8 iMac Workstations
• 1 MacMini Server

I have other devices but they dont need listed for this.

Right now I have Apple Remote Desktop Running on my personal laptop at home and all machines in the office. However, When I setup port forwarding in this router I have to specify an IP address and a port number. For ARD I have the following set to the MacMini Server:

Port 5900 and 3283 are forwarded to 192.168.1.100

While I am out of the office I get a list of only this machine in the office and I can connect to it just fine, but is there a way to allow these ports to be open for all IPs within my LAN. The reason is some of these machines are setup with DHCP and the internal IPs will change at times. I want to see a list of all avaliable computers running ARD in the office so that I can remotely manage all of them... not just one.

Any ideas? Thanks for any help you can provide!

 

[jdabbs]

You won't quite get what you are asking for, but with some additional configuration you can get fairly close. With only one public IP, ports are mapped on a one-to-one basis. In order to communicate with multiple devices, you need to set up a unique port (or however many you need for a single connection) for each IP. You can work around the IP changing by using static IPs or setting up a reserved DHCP lease for each workstation.

Example:

Mac1: 01:23:45:67:89:0A --> 192.168.1.201 (reserved lease)
Mac2: 01:23:45:67:89:0B --> 192.168.1.202 (reserved lease)

Public IP 1.2.3.4 port 5900 --> 192.168.1.201 5900
Public IP 1.2.3.4 port 5901 --> 192.168.1.202 5900