Hacked

[wilsonmw04]

What they do is troll the internet looking for large hosting systems. Most of their accounts are small and use PhP Or MySQL. They don't care how big or small the site is. They do it for kicks.

Why do folks spray paint builds? Because they have brains no bigger than your average canine...

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by whytheheckme

Now-a-days, I actually DO have RDP open on my domain (which is run out of my datacenter), but my gateway (that I built, its a P4 w/ 2.5 GB RAM fyi) forwards the RDP port to a specific Terminal Server, that is set up soley for that purpose. Once logged into the Terminal Server, you can access a secure area of my network (using encryption) which allows you to Remote Desktop any of the servers on my network (I run 7 servers 24/7 on my domain).

To stray a little from the topic at hand, I'm curious about that setup—mainly because I've always got it in the back of my head to try something similar. As I read your description it looks like your topology is like this:

Remote Computer (RC) ==RC's RDP=> Gateway ==Forwarded RC's RDP=> Terminal Server (TS) ==TS's RDP inside forwarded RC's RDP=> Specific Server

Doesn't that mean you're creating a second RDP session from within your terminal services client? Does that work well? (I've run RealVNC from within MSTSC, and it's terrible, but that should come as no surprise because MSTSC isn't VNC-aware. I don't recall what happens when you nest MSTSC, though.) Isn't it more usual (in the corporate world) to encapsulate the whole thing in a VPN over a different port, and have the gateway forward that directly to the required (specific) server?

Basically, it would be interesting to compare those methods...though in real life, I may have the rather more pressing problem of what to do when my cable or DSL provider decides to dynamically allocate a new IP, making me lose track of where my network exists at any given time.

[EHaskins]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I may have the rather more pressing problem of what to do when my cable or DSL provider decides to dynamically allocate a new IP, making me lose track of where my network exists at any given time.

Check out dyndns.com's dynamic DNS service. Its free, and I know that my Linksys router will automatically keep it up to date.

[whytheheckme]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

To stray a little from the topic at hand, I'm curious about that setup—mainly because I've always got it in the back of my head to try something similar. As I read your description it looks like your topology is like this:

Remote Computer (RC) ==RC's RDP=> Gateway ==Forwarded RC's RDP=> Terminal Server (TS) ==TS's RDP inside forwarded RC's RDP=> Specific Server

Doesn't that mean you're creating a second RDP session from within your terminal services client? Does that work well? (I've run RealVNC from within MSTSC, and it's terrible, but that should come as no surprise because MSTSC isn't VNC-aware. I don't recall what happens when you nest MSTSC, though.) Isn't it more usual (in the corporate world) to encapsulate the whole thing in a VPN over a different port, and have the gateway forward that directly to the required (specific) server?

Basically, it would be interesting to compare those methods...though in real life, I may have the rather more pressing problem of what to do when my cable or DSL provider decides to dynamically allocate a new IP, making me lose track of where my network exists at any given time.

MSTSC works WONDERFULLY cascaded.... I regularly run 3 or 4 remote desktop windows inside of each other... Image this:

Remote Computer => The Internet (as low as 115kbps via cell phone up to say 30 or 40 megabit on a good cable connection or on campus) => my gateway => gigabit LAN => specific server => gigabit LAN => somewhere else on the network => gigabit LAN => somewhere else

and so on and so forth. The big speed problem is in your internet connection, but once inside the LAN, RDC windows running inside of each other is absolutley no problem. I believe that the client is actually designed to do this (as it does it so seamlessly.)

And regarding your 'dynamic IP'...

Most cable providers give dynamic IPs based on MAC address, so as long as you are connecting to the cable network with the same modem, you will have the same IP.... always.

DSL on the other hand
gives you a new IP dynamically every time you reboot the connecting modem. How wonderful.

Eric is TOTALLY on the ball as far as dyndns's service. It wonderful, as I used to use it before my cable provider started handing out 'static' IPs (yeah, I know, its not truely static, but its really really close.) You can use a bit of software to continuously report to dyndns your IP address. Awesome awesome stuff.

Jacob

[Tristan Lall]

And interestingly enough, DynDNS appears to be a FIRST team sponsor (for FRC501). I'll look into them....

[Scott L.]

DDNS:
http://www.EditDNS.net is another good dynamic DNS, it works with domains like abc.xyz
Where abc is the Second level domain and xyz is the top level domain.
Its free to use and alows control over the A, AAA, MX, NS, SRV, CNAME
More advanced features cost $6 for 6 months access to setup, but once set you don't need to pay after the 6 months unless you need to change a more advanced feature. I use the free service with my self hosted web sites and it works great.

Hosting:
The company I work with uses host rocket to host theirs and their customers sites on.
http://www.hostrocket.com/
They have 24/7 tech support (Actually called at 2am on Saturday)

Misc:
I haven't had much php or mySQL experience yet (I use SQL express and ASP.net 2.0), but would recomend making sure everything is up to date, and recheck all settings for any possible security holes.

I have two dual Xeon 2.6GHz HT (Device manager shows 4 CPUs) servers each with 1GB of Ram, striping Raid on Data Drives (SCSI LVD), 250GB SAN Storage for backups, VPN/Firewall router between servers and Internet
I used one of these servers to host the live web cast of PARC X.

[Tristan Lall]

Just to prove that Jacob's suggestion works, I'm making this post on my university's Windows Server 2003 terminal server, connected over Remote Desktop to a Windows XP virtual machine, which is itself connected over Remote Desktop to a Windows 98 virtual machine. Both VMs are running locally on Windows Vista (no, I didn't nest those too). It all seems to work pretty well (if you can tolerate 8-bit colour).

[EHaskins]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Just to prove that Jacob's suggestion works, I'm making this post on my university's Windows Server 2003 terminal server, connected over Remote Desktop to a Windows XP virtual machine, which is itself connected over Remote Desktop to a Windows 98 virtual machine. Both VMs are running locally on Windows Vista (no, I didn't nest those too). It all seems to work pretty well (if you can tolerate 8-bit colour).

You can change the color settings. Open the RDC windows, click "Options", Click the "Display" tab, and change it.