Is there a dumb man's guide to sharing Slimserver on the Internet securely?

[agentsmith]

I have a dream to open my Slimserver so I can stream my own music when away from home.

Does anyone have a absolute dumb axe guide to sharing Slimserver over a home network riding on a Rresidenial DSL or Cable network?While maintaining security?

Bearing in mind that most ISPs, including myself, only offers dynamic IP addresses?

[malsbury]

I have a dream to open my Slimserver so I can stream my own music when away from home.

Does anyone have a absolute dumb axe guide to sharing Slimserver over a home network riding on a Rresidenial DSL or Cable network?While maintaining security?

Bearing in mind that most ISPs, including myself, only offers dynamic IP addresses?There is not a guide that I know of, but I agree it would be a great addition to the wiki. This is something that I have been doing since the very first beta release of SoftSqueeze and have helped a few people getting it setup over the last few years.

If you would like to work with me, I will do my best to get you up and running. Then I can document our steps through the entire process and post them to the wiki.

Let me know what OS you are running slimserver on, what the basic setup of your home network is, what OS you will be using to remotley access your home network, does your remote location (i.e. your office) have any firewall/VPN security that may block nonstandard network traffic.

That will be a good start for me to give you some step by step instructions to start with. Then we can see what roadblocks you hit and go from there.

It is definitly worth getting up and running. I don't know how my wife and I would get through the workday without SoftSqueeze....

--Tom Malsbury

[ezkcdude]

I have a dream to open my Slimserver so I can stream my own music when away from home.

Does anyone have a absolute dumb axe guide to sharing Slimserver over a home network riding on a Rresidenial DSL or Cable network?While maintaining security?

Bearing in mind that most ISPs, including myself, only offers dynamic IP addresses?

I just did this yesterday. Basically, you should sign up with one of the free dynamic dns services (I'm using dyndns.org). Once you sign up you will get a domain name that is linked to your IP address. The only tricky part is updating the IP address dynamically when it changes. There are some free programs out there (I looked at DNSer, for example). However, my router (Linksys WRT54G) has this ability in the software. Once you have your DNS setup, all you need to do is connect to your domain name (for example, myname.dyndns.org:9000) on a browser, which will open up a SlimServer client, and open up the stream in WinAmp (myname.dyndns.org:9000/stream.mp3) and hit play. It should work. Make sure to keep the SlimServer running on your "server" machine. Also, make sure your server does not go to sleep. Well, that's what worked for me. Hope this gets you going.

[agentsmith]

There is not a guide that I know of, but I agree it would be a great addition to the wiki. This is something that I have been doing since the very first beta release of SoftSqueeze and have helped a few people getting it setup over the last few years.

If you would like to work with me, I will do my best to get you up and running. Then I can document our steps through the entire process and post them to the wiki.

Let me know what OS you are running slimserver on, what the basic setup of your home network is, what OS you will be using to remotley access your home network, does your remote location (i.e. your office) have any firewall/VPN security that may block nonstandard network traffic.

That will be a good start for me to give you some step by step instructions to start with. Then we can see what roadblocks you hit and go from there.

It is definitly worth getting up and running. I don't know how my wife and I would get through the workday without SoftSqueeze....

--Tom Malsbury

Tom you are a star!

Here is my Configuration:

Slimserver:
- OS: Windows XP Professional SP2
- Network Card: Wireless G
- SlimServer Version: 6.22
- Storage: Mapped to a Buffalo LANStation network drive

Network Drive:
- LANStation 160GB network drive
- 100Mbps FE connection to Network hub

Home Network:
- Buffalo WBR2-G54 Wireless Router
- Running NAT and DHCP
- ISP: ADSL, PPPoE (set to autodial)
- ISP issues dynamic IP with DHCP only (But network is pretty always on, so as long as I can find out my IP, I should be goot for weeks)

Remote OS: Windows XP Only

Remote Location 1: Assume no firewall/VPN blockage

Remote Location 2 (Work): Very tight firewall security, dont think any nonstandard traffic is allowed. So access from work may be out? Unless of course if I make it a public streaming site?

[malsbury]

Tom you are a star!

Here is my Configuration:

Slimserver:
- OS: Windows XP Professional SP2
- Network Card: Wireless G
- SlimServer Version: 6.22
- Storage: Mapped to a Buffalo LANStation network drive

Home Network:
- Buffalo WBR2-G54 Wireless Router
- Running NAT and DHCP
- ISP: ADSL, PPPoE (set to autodial)
- ISP issues dynamic IP with DHCP only (But network is pretty always on, so as long as I can find out my IP, I should be goot for weeks)

Remote OS: Windows XP Only

Looks like this should be doable... The key to doing this securely is to use SSH. The basic setup that we are trying to achieve is that you will be running some form of an SSH server on your SlimServer machine, you will punch one hole in your NAT for SSH to setup a secure tunnel through, then at the remote location you will run a SSH client (there is one built into SoftSqueeze) that will complete the secure tunnel and forward all necessary SlimServer traffic through the tunnel as if your remote machine was directly connected to your home LAN.

To do this I recommend installing OpenSSH for windows. It is free and opensource and many people have had success with it. It is available at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sshwindows/setupssh381-20040709.zip

You can see some tips on setting it up on the How-To section of SoftSqueeze SSH page:

http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/ssh.html

Next you will need to make a hole in your NAT that take any traffic that comes in from your ISP on port 22 (SSH's port) and forward it to your XP machine on the internal LAN. This is normally referred to as "Port Forwarding". I looked at the manual for your router and Buffalo seems to call it "Address Translation" on pg 48-49 of the online manual. Basically what you need to set in the router is that all requests on Port 22 get forwarded to the IP of your XP box.

Since you have a Dynamic IP address, you should set up an account on dyndns.org. This way you always will have url that will point home, even if your ISP changes you IP address. My router has the ability to detect when my ISP assigns me a new IP and automatically updates the entry with dyndns.org. I didn't see a similar feature in the manual for your router, but I know that there are a few software solutions that you could run on your XP server that periodically probe your ISP IP and can update a dydns.org account if it detects a change.

From the remote location you will need to download SoftSqueeze, http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net . And install Java 5.0 on the machine, http://www.java.com . Once you have SoftSqueeze installed and running, you can enter the URL you set up or the ISP IP if you didn't bother. You also need to click "Use SSH" on the Server info section in the Preferences.

It might seem like a lot, but it is not that hard once you see the basic steps involved. If you would like a little more background info you can read up on SSH-tunneling and Port-Forwarding. Let me know how things go, and let me know if you need clarification on any or all steps.

--Tom Malsbury

[agentsmith]

Looks like this should be doable... The key to doing this securely is to use SSH. The basic setup that we are trying to achieve is that you will be running some form of an SSH server on your SlimServer machine, you will punch one hole in your NAT for SSH to setup a secure tunnel through, then at the remote location you will run a SSH client (there is one built into SoftSqueeze) that will complete the secure tunnel and forward all necessary SlimServer traffic through the tunnel as if your remote machine was directly connected to your home LAN.

To do this I recommend installing OpenSSH for windows. It is free and opensource and many people have had success with it. It is available at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sshwindows/setupssh381-20040709.zip

You can see some tips on setting it up on the How-To section of SoftSqueeze SSH page:

http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/ssh.html

Next you will need to make a hole in your NAT that take any traffic that comes in from your ISP on port 22 (SSH's port) and forward it to your XP machine on the internal LAN. This is normally referred to as "Port Forwarding". I looked at the manual for your router and Buffalo seems to call it "Address Translation" on pg 48-49 of the online manual. Basically what you need to set in the router is that all requests on Port 22 get forwarded to the IP of your XP box.

Since you have a Dynamic IP address, you should set up an account on dyndns.org. This way you always will have url that will point home, even if your ISP changes you IP address. My router has the ability to detect when my ISP assigns me a new IP and automatically updates the entry with dyndns.org. I didn't see a similar feature in the manual for your router, but I know that there are a few software solutions that you could run on your XP server that periodically probe your ISP IP and can update a dydns.org account if it detects a change.

From the remote location you will need to download SoftSqueeze, http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net . And install Java 5.0 on the machine, http://www.java.com . Once you have SoftSqueeze installed and running, you can enter the URL you set up or the ISP IP if you didn't bother. You also need to click "Use SSH" on the Server info section in the Preferences.

It might seem like a lot, but it is not that hard once you see the basic steps involved. If you would like a little more background info you can read up on SSH-tunneling and Port-Forwarding. Let me know how things go, and let me know if you need clarification on any or all steps.

--Tom Malsbury
Thanks again Tom, I will have to try it when I get home.

By the way, is there any way to access this SSH tunnel with another SB2, or am I asking too much? :)

[mherger]

> By the way, is there any way to access this SSH tunnel with another
> SB2, or am I asking too much? :)

You'd need a helper PC which tunnels the ports needed using ssh. You then
define that PC as the local slimserver.

--

Michael

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