Architecture for generating and maintaining a terminal services connection from an external client to an internal intranet client behind a firewall and/or router. The external user is first authenticated after which the external client is passed to a remote user portal. A listing of available internal computers is presented to the external client user, the selection of one that initiates an intranet server to create a listening socket thereon, and a socket on the selected internal client. The server creates a thread that manages the terminal services connection between the external client and the internal client by listening for traffic and forwarding the traffic between the ports.