Can't even ping, trying to use PC Anywhere

A friend of mine is having some issues that I am trying to help with. He wants to use PC Anywhere to connect to his home computer from work.

Network:
He has a broadband connection via Cable modem (Charter Pipeline). The modem feeds in to his router. He has a standard ethernet network with four computers that are directly connected to this router.

Problem:
The router has 2 IP's (obviously) - the local private IP: 192.168.0.1, and the public WAN-side IP that is assigned by Charter. I don't want to post the full IP (for privacy's sake), hence the X's:

24.107.XXX.XXX
subnet mask: 255.255.240.0

Now, I cannot even ping, traceroute or contact this IP in any way from a remote location (like his office). I can ping it from home, inside the LAN though.

I don't understand why I can't even ping his IP address from outside the house. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Chris

Some routers can be configured to block icmp, mine calls it 'Block WAN request', or stealth mode.

It doesn't mean that pc-anywhere won't work though, you need to set the router to forward the ports that pc-anywhere uses to the machine inside that he wants to connect to.

If he's using dhcp to get an ip for the internal machine, the forwarding may have to be changed each time the ip is renewed (often it will get the same ip anyways) or else it will have to be setup with a static ip.

hedge is correct. I've got a similar situation - I can't ping the external IP address from the Internet, but I can still access services, such as web etc. It's probably best if you leave it like this, and don't allow responds to ping comands. Just make sure you do all the port forwarding like he says, and you'll be fine.