a friend of mine and i were working on a project. he has aol and i was trying to get his IP address so we could use remote desktop...but aol has some sort of mask or something. i'm kind of a beginner with this IP stuff but i'm wondering how we could find out what the heck his IP is???

You are dealing with NAT or Network Address Translation. His IP address is behind a router's translation layer. For AOL, it could be multiple levels of NAT. The IP that you see on the internet, and the IP that he sees from his workstation are two different things.

I do not know how to configure Remote Desktop to work from behind NAT. Perhaps someone else here can help with that, or maybe a Google on those search terms might reveal a howto page.

VNC allows a kind of reversed connection, where the person sharing his desktop can go out and connect to the viewer. I don't know if that helps you with your project at all, but I believe that (or something like it) is the only thing you're going to be able to do sitting behind AOL's NAT.

Microsoft claims that Remote Desktop is not possible in a NAT situation. However, I was able to get it to work! :-D! I don't have time to write a how-to. But you can circumvent the problem with a few minutes of footwork. :-D

Calvin

thank's to everyone...i appreciate the help.