Can't Access Server over SSH!

[dagordon]

I have several locations from which I like to access my music, and so far everything has been working perfectly. Basically, at home I'm running an SSH server, and at each of the remote locations I'm have an SSH tunnel set up to the home server. At the remote locations I can access SB Server just fine by going to http://x.x.x.x:9000, where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the computer running the SSH client.

I have several Booms set up at the remote locations, each of which sees the server just fine; like I said, everything has been working perfectly...

...until I decided to buy the Touch. The touch can't find the server. I tried entering a Remote Library w/ the IP address of the machine running the SSH client, and it doesn't work.

I fear this is related to this NOW OVER 2 YEAR OLD bug:

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8800

also described in this thread:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47949&highlight=ssh+udp

i.e., for some reason no one can explain, SqueezePlay (which I take it the Touch uses?) requires UDP ports to be forwarded.

Has anyone got this working with a Touch?

It'd really a shame if there were no way to get the Touch working with what is pretty much the only secure way to access the server from a remote location (SSH).

[dwilliams01]

I'm still waiting for it as well...

Right now, there is a huge usage hole with this. Granted it is sort of on the technical side of things to setup, but extremely simple to use once it is setup so I'd not hessitate setting up something like this for a non-technical relative, etc. if given the chance.

It would be nice if all of the "new" players/devices had this capability - even if I have to setup a box at the remote location to funnel everything through.

For the older ones, I'd understand that there is no chance of support without the remote box to handle the ssh - that would be fine as well, but I can see not making it a priority since the major emphasis would be to sell new units...

[dagordon]

I'm still waiting for it as well...

Right now, there is a huge usage hole with this. Granted it is sort of on the technical side of things to setup, but extremely simple to use once it is setup so I'd not hessitate setting up something like this for a non-technical relative, etc. if given the chance.

This was actually why I got the Touch -- to allow my parents to access my music from their house. We have a Boom at their place in the room where we usually stay when we're visiting, and it works flawlessly.

This is a major step backwards with the SqueezePlay-based devices. I really would rather be able to, you know, listen to my music as I always have, than be able to Facebook, or whatever the heck else the priorities are now...

[welom]

You can ssh into the Touch and try this:

ssh [email protected] -L 9000:remote.server.com:9000 -L 3483:remote.server.com:3483 -g

Then select localhost (127.0.0.1) as the music source.

I've tried this using my local server (192.168.etc) as the "remote" server and I was able to connect to the tunneled server.

[welom]

You can ssh into the Touch and try this:

ssh [email protected] -L 9000:remote.server.com:9000 -L 3483:remote.server.com:3483 -g

Then select localhost (127.0.0.1) as the music source.

I've tried this using my local server (192.168.etc) as the "remote" server and I was able to connect to the tunneled server.

hmm.. actually it does not work. Squeezeplay immediately switched back to the previous server when selecting 127.0.0.1, that's why i thought it successfully connected to localhost.

Sorry..

[dagordon]

hmm.. actually it does not work. Squeezeplay immediately switched back to the previous server when selecting 127.0.0.1, that's why i thought it successfully connected to localhost.

Sorry..

Well thank you for the attempt; that's more than I've heard out of tech support in the two years that this bug has been open...

[welom]

I came across this:

http://zarb.org/~gc/html/udp-in-ssh-tunneling.html

and tried the suggestion at the bottom: to forward the upd-traffic via socat. So I added port 9011 to my tcp-tunnel to tunnel the upd traffic for port 3483 across it.

Server side: socat tcp4-listen:9011,reuseaddr,fork UDP:localhost:3483
Client side: socat udp4-listen:3483,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:9011

I've tried this setup with Windows Xp and Ubuntu 10.04 as clients (socat is available as windows-binary with cygwin dll's), but with none of them I was able to connect to squeezebox server.

The server is Debian Lenny btw.

I'm really surprised, that apparently nearly nobody seems to care about connecting to a remote library over ssh..

[dagordon]

Thanks again welom for your attempt.

I've decided to try to return my Touch to Logitech for a refund, as there seems to be no evidence that this will ever be fixed. It's too bad.

[jmbylsma]

I was able to find a solution and posted it on my blog http://stonezdup.com/2012/03/ssh-tun...d-squeezeplay/ as well as on the slimdevices Bugzilla http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8800. To hit as many eyeballs as possible, I'm reposting the text from the Bugzilla post here.


I was able to workaround the UDP requirement and have posted my findings at http://stonezdup.com/2012/03/ssh-tun...d-squeezeplay/

The main trick is using socat (http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/) to forward the UDP traffic over a random SSH forwarded port and then retranslates it back to to UDP on the other side. There's a lot more information in the blog post, but I wanted to include a straightforward shell script here just in case something happened to my server.

#!/bin/bash
username=example_user
hostname=example.com

ssh -f -g \
-L 3483:localhost:3483 \
-L 3484:localhost:3484 \
-L 9000:localhost:9000 \
[email protected]$hostname \
'socat tcp4-listen:3484,reuseaddr,fork UDP:localhost:3483'

socat -T15 udp4-recvfrom:3483,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:3484

[hubbaloo]

Great post, thanks for the info.
I wonder if I can install socat on my tomato router..