Trouble shooting when an RA connection can not be established

We will try to keep this section updated with findings we are making.

Firewall

Firewall’s on your side have to have port 3389 open for Remote Assistance to work.

Router, ISP Internet modem (ADSL)

Routers which support UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) are much easier to work with (i.e. some versions of  Orange’s LiveBox is not supporting this standard, so Remote Assistance might not work).

If you use Microsoft Live Messenger you can see if you use a UPnP enabled router or not by “Options/connection” and it will show a screen like the following.

Allow Remote assistance

In Windows XP and Vista there is a setting which is disabling this by default.  The setting can be found in “System Properties” - see the following two screen shots from a Vista and an XP machine.

My Vista machine runs the French version, but the English screen should look just about the same.  If you are running Vista you can select the same option under “Bureau à distance” as is shown above or you can select the last option (recommended), if you are on XP see the screen below.