Your router ignores incoming connection requests (like from your brother's computer) unless you've told it, "any incoming request to this port number goes to that internal IP address." "Telling" is port forwarding. So you forward port 5901 to 192.168.1.2 (your computer - use its real internal IP address). Then, at your brother's house, you connect the VPN client program (which you have to install on his computer) to your computer's external IP address (which you can get by going to whatsmyip.org on your computer).
Logmein eliminates all this by having both computers connect to their server, and outgoing connectrion requests aren't blocked by the router. (It's not that some nasty router designer decided to block incoming requests, it's that, due to what they do, routers have no idea what to do with incoming requests unless you tell them what to do with each port you want to accept requests on.)
Logmein eliminates all this by having both computers connect to their server, and outgoing connectrion requests aren't blocked by the router. (It's not that some nasty router designer decided to block incoming requests, it's that, due to what they do, routers have no idea what to do with incoming requests unless you tell them what to do with each port you want to accept requests on.)
