RDP to Workstations Through Sonicwall On Custom Ports

When a user wants to connect from home to his / her computer at work using RDP, and you have a SonicWALL at the office, this is how you need to configure things:

DHCP

First, make sure the workstation gets the same IP address every time it connects to the network. You can do this by either setting it to a static IP outside of the DHCP range, or set a "reservation" in your DHCP server. In this case, the DHCP server is a Windows 2003 SBS server, and I've set a reservation.

In this example, the user is "Jim" and the local IP address of his workstation into which he would like to remote is 192.168.21.30, as seen below in the list of reservations.



The RDP Port

Now that this machine is set to get the same IP at every connection, you need to change the port that RDP listens on. This is detailed in this post. For this example, the workstation is listening on port 3392.

The Address Objects

Create an address object for the computer. Give the object a name you'll recognize.



Service Objects

You need to create two service objects, one for TCP traffic on port 3392 and one for UDP traffic on port 3392. Name them something you'll recognize



Service Group

Create a service group, and add both service objects you created above. Name it something you'll recognize



NAT Policy

Create a NAT policy. Make sure to put in a comment identifying the purpose of the policy. Use the following values:



Access Rule

Create an access rule. Make sure to put in a comment identifying the purpose of the policy. Use the following values:



RDP Connection

Test the RDP connection from outside the organization. Make sure you put the port number at the end of the public IP (or corresponding URL).