How to access my Raspberry Pi remotely?

I thought this was a basic task, but it ate two days of my time.

I want to remotely (meaning: not in the same network) access my Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian from Windows 7 in a way that I can see the desktop, click, type, etc.

• Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't work on it.
• XMing only works in the same network.
• XRPD only works in the same network.
• RealVNC Viewer only works in the same network.
• NoMachine has an explicit tutorial (archive) on how to access a Raspberry Pi remotely from a different network, but at the place where I would expect an external IP address, I only see a local one.
• The IP address that wieistmeineip.de shows me also doesn't work with it.
• After nothing else allowed me to connect from a different network, I tried faking being in the local network using OpenVPN (Raspberry end, archive, Windows end, archive). The Raspberry said that the network was successfully created, the Windows PC said that it successfully connected to it, but the Raspberry doesn't show it in the client list and I still can't connect.

So how do I do it? How do I do the basic task of seeing and using my Raspberry desktop from another device?

2

3 Answers

TeamViewer is a well-known product for remote control between any two systems connected to the Internet, and is free for personal or trial use. They have a version available for the Raspberry Pi, but it supports Host mode (remoting target) only, and requires ARMv7 hardfloat (RPi 2 or better).

Outside your network you may need to configure router/firewall/etc to forward incoming connection to RPI (ex rdp standard port is 3379). Depending on your router model, you can find various documents for "virtual server", "port forwarding" topic.

xrdp works fine for me outside RPI's home network.

AnyDesk is another remote-control program compatible with Raspberry Pi.

Some of the features:

• Remote-controlling to and from Raspberry Pi, Android, Linux, Windows and more.
• Devices can be controlled with local confirmation or a device-specific password. This is different from TeamViewer's model of logging in with an account that is shared between all devices on that account and either enabling unattended access for that account or not. This enables some permission combinations that are impossible on TeamViewer (and I use them), but it also meant that for many devices, you need to enter the password O(n²) times to enable controlling everything from everywhere.
• Audio transmission, transmitting almost all key combinations, video recording, …
• I find it generally nicer to use, for example on TeamViewer I needed to set "best quality" and "show remote cursor" every time and got a popup at the end.
• (It does not seem to be usable in a browser, unlike Chrome remote desktop.)

Information about devices/systems where I know something about it:

• On Raspbian, it is included in the default repositories and can be installed with Synaptic or apt-get.
• On many other Linux systems, it is available in repositories or from the website.
• On Manjaro there are different packages available in the "aur" repository (may need to be enabled). The Debian-based one was removed, the Raspberry Pi-based one should probably not be used, you'll want the anydesk-bin package.
• On Android, it's available in Google Play Store, but can by default only control other devices. To control the phone, you need a plugin that depends on the device and system. It is not available for all devices and systems, but a lot.
• For Windows, it can be downloaded from the website.
• According to the website, it is also available for macOS, iOS, FreeBSD and Chrome OS.

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