Mapping a drive over the Internet

[ChrisDavis]

I have an office network connected to the Internet by wireless through ISP #1. My desk machine is XP Pro and is assigned a static IP from our BEFSR11 Linksys router and we have a static IP address from our ISP #1.

I have a home network connected to the Internet by a Cable modem through ISP #2. My home machine is Win98SE and is assigned a static IP from my BEFSR41 Linksys router and I have a static IP address from my IPS #2.

I currently have port forwarding enabled on both routers for PC Anywhere and it works well between these two machines. Currently I have no security set up on the Win98 machine and the entire Drive C is shared.

What I want to do is map a drive from the home machine to the office machine. I have tried the usual \\123.456.7.8\drivesharename\, where the IP address is the one supplied by ISP #2, with no success. However it does take a while to fail where if I use the wrong IP it will fail immediately.

Are there other ports I need to open, forward or trigger in the Lynksys boxes to get this to work?

[DVNT1]

If you openly allow the MS File Sharing ports to be accessed on your Win98 machine (from the Internet) you will be exploited. Even with a password protected share.

I highly discourage it.

That said and you still want to do it, I think it's ports 135, 136, 137, and 138. BTW, if your router supports filtering by source address too, then be sure to limit access to those ports from only a source address of your other static IP.

[M_Six]

I highly discourage it.

This should be in big red letters.

Look into Radmin. It has remote desktop control and a file sharing feature. It' secure and only requires you to open one port. You can even choose which port. It also allows you to filter connections by IP address. And it's cheap.

[ChrisDavis]

Yes I believe the router supports Filtering so I could secure things somewhat. Do you know if by default, do Linksys routers normally secure ports 135-138? Would opening these ports at both ends get this working assuming that one of the ISP’s does not have them locked down? Can these ports be changed to something that is not so standard for additional security?

[DVNT1]

I don't know linksys defaults.

You only need to open those ports on the end that has file you want to access.

They can not reasonably be changed.

M_Six's Radmin idea is a much better idea then just MS File Sharing over the Internet. Because you will get exploited if just using Win9x with password protected file shares. Might be in the form of data loss, data corruption, virus infected, identity theft, or even turned in a "zombie" machine.