[mythtv-users] Remote Record Scheduling ??

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Apr 14 00:50:39 UTC 2006


On Apr 13, 2006, at 6:03 PM, Greg Woods wrote:

> 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.
>

That would work (obviously, because you're using it), of course you  
need your laptop.

For securing ssh access I ran into a very neat security solution,  
port knocking. An example would be that you need to hit your server's  
port x, then port y twice, then port z once and port x again three  
times, *then* the ssh port would be opened up. Sort of like a  
combination lock. It could be used in conjunction with temporal,  
phase-of-moon, current date's square root and all sorts of algorithms  
to have a very secure "combination". You could bury your current IP  
address in the "combination" and have it call you back, all sorts of  
possibilities.

I'm thinking of a solution that would work if you had none of your  
own gear, say you were at a public library someplace, or a Kinkos  
store, with only the most basic (probably Windows, or Mac if you're  
lucky) software. That's why I was wondering about sending an email.  
Perhaps something you could do from your phone or PDA.

Of course you would need to know *what* you wanted to record, so I  
guess you would need a program guide of some type.

But if you could just specify a channel and a timeslot, that would be  
good enough I think. Say somebody told you of a great not-to-be- 
repeated program and you just wanted to get it on disk.




More information about the mythtv-users mailing list