[mythtv-users] Remote Record Scheduling ??

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Fri Apr 14 00:03:40 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 17:35 -0600, Brian Wood wrote:

> Any thoughts on a way to schedule a recording from anywhere on the  
> net without having to enable full-time access to your system from the  
> outside world ?

I do it using SSH port forwarding. Something like this:

$ ssh -L 80:backend:80 myserver.mydomain

Forwards port 80 on my laptop through to port 80 on the backend machine
in my house. Doesn't expose the backend to the net, because you must
authenticate to the server and get logged in first.

There are a couple of gotchas in doing this. First, the ssh command must
be run as root because you are binding to a privileged port. I solve
this by running the command in a script, and wrapping that script with a
setuid binary. Yes, there is a security risk associated with that, but
someone would have already have to have gained access to my laptop to
exploit it. Next, it appears that MythWeb (at least the 0.18 that I
have) embeds the host name in some of it's links. This means I have to
have my browser connect to backend.mydomain, but when I'm traveling,
this must in turn resolve to locahost, so I have to put that equivalance
in /etc/hosts. This works, but when I get back home, it breaks (unless I
log in to the server first and bounce the mythweb connections off the
server even when I'm at home, which is what I do).

Not particularly elegant, but it works. I can browse to
http://backend.mydomain, and up comes the MythWeb page and I can
schedule recordings to my heart's content. Try that with the crappy 6412
Comcast DVR.

--Greg




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