No idea which port remdesk uses. Could be a nightmare trying to find out, I really don't get on with W8. And there is only the one machine...
I expect the Windows firewall will want to stick its nose in too.
I suspect I'll be wanting to set up remote access to her router sooner or later...
It all falls apart, of course, when it turns out her ISP doesn't always give her the same IP and she's incapable of following "Start Firefox, click the bookmark that says 'router status' and tell me the IP address it lists"
Backstory: We've been intending to set up remote access to her machine for a while as it /ought/ to be easier than trying to debug her problems over the phone. I finally started the process today after she called saying it wouldn't send an email with the message "Outlook has a dialog box open", and she didn't even think of shrinking away her current window to find said dialog box (or just have a bit of a look around)(in fact it turns out she didn't really know you could minimise a window while you went off to do something else) : she asked me what a dialog box is - "it's a box on the screen that's trying to have a dialogue with you" means nothing to her despite being fairly standard English.
Yep, we use dyndns.org for remote administering my Dad's system without him needing to be able to tell us what his IP address is. [Edit: and I'm not sure what you mean by "adminstering your own DNS" - nothing like that required at all. You just set up the router to ping its IP address over to a particular user account on dyndns.org and then you connect to [user].dyndns.org instead of an IP address.]
Basically I know what NAT is, then I kinda lost the thread of the other comments. :-) I use Teamviewer to remotely access my Dads laptop along with my machine I leave in work and various Aunts and Uncles. It basically just works and I have never needed to monkey with any settings etc no matter what router I have been going through. Only disadvantage is that whenever I disconnect it puts a box up on the remote pc that my parents never recognise despite it coming up Every. Single. Time.. It just needs clicking off as it is basically just an ad.