So this morning I was in a bind, I’m sitting at work and wanted to listen to my music collection at home but my player was telling my that the share didn’t exist, to fix it I needed to reboot the box. Since the collection is served up by Media Jukebox it is housed on a Windows box which further complicates matters because I have no real command line tools at my disposal, the only way I can interact with the box is through TightVNC. Now, TightVNC is running on all the boxes but when I installed the new router I made the conscious decision not to punch the ports for it so I’m back to square one. Enter PuTTY and SSH.
While at work I use PuTTY to connect to my server at home, it is all command line which is fine for nearly 99.9% of the tasks I perform but when I have to administer that one lone Windows PC I’m out of luck. So to work on that box I’ll either need to punch holes or set up a tunnel using SSH and PuTTY. I opted for the latter which proved to be so easy I was surprised. The University of Stockholm has a well written tutorial on it that I used to get things rolling in under five minutes.
The key point to remember is that the tunnel needs to be configured from the perspective of the host machine so the default TightVNC settings would be localhost:5900.
Then all you need to do is setup the session like you normally would, connect, log in, then launch TightVNC and point it towards localhost and viola! Now I just need to think of other applications where tunneling would be handy–secure surfing at Internet cafes come to mind.
I’ve been really impressed with hamachi for secure access without port forwarding. However, when I was in denver, I found it a little flaky…I think the hotel’s router was the problem…
Hamachi looks like a good solution, particularly for windows; I went the PuTTY route since I was already running SSH on my server and figured I might as well leverage my infrastructure.