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Old 20-Jul-2019, 4:42 PM   #2
GroundUrMast
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Greater Seattle Area
Posts: 4,773
The SiliconDust tuners that I own are not engineered to send data through the public Internet. There are probably several reasons that caused SiliconDust to make that design choice, perhaps some legal issues but just a few years ago, most 'high speed' Internet service was likely inadequate to support the data rate of an HD TV broadcast. Whatever the reason, I needed to set up a reliable VPN connection from the remote location into the location of the tuner.

I run Linux on my Media-Center-PC and laptop. So I settled on using Secure Shell (SSH) to establish an encrypted tunnel connection into my network. The first step was to enable dynamic-DNS (DDNS) so that the public IP address of my gateway router could be reached from a remote location. After signing up for DDNS service, I added my domain name and account credentials into the configuration of my gateway router. At that point, I was able to find the public IP address of my gateway router when I was at a remote location such as a coffee shop or my friends house.

The next step was to configure port forwarding on my gateway router so that SSH tunnel packets would be allowed into my network and forwarded to my Media-Center-PC. I opted to map a non-standard port from the public side of my gateway router to the well-known SSH port 22 on my Media-Center-PC.

On the Media-Center-PC and the laptop, I opted to generate/install encryption keys and then configure the SSH service to not allow username/password authentication... Only connections using pre-shared keys are allowed. Once I was able to 'SSH' into my Media-Center-PC from a public location I moved on to connecting to the tuner.

To connect to the TV tuner I needed the tuner to think it was talking to my Media-Center-PC which is on the same private LAN. The 'trick' is to us the tunnel feature of SSH. The command used on the remote laptop is actually not much different than the basic command used to connect to a shell (command prompt) on the Media-Center-PC/SSH-server...
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Last edited by GroundUrMast; 20-Jul-2019 at 5:30 PM. Reason: sp.
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