Port forwarding from RPi to Windows machine

If you're running SSH on the Pi on a public port you can make a port forward. This tunnels port 1234 to port 4567 on the Windows machine:

ssh -L 1234:windows-pc.lan:4567 snipped-for-privacy@raspberrypi.my.house

with windows-pc.lan and raspberrypi.my.house being the DNS names or IP addresses of the machines concerned. Then you tell whatever app you're using to connect to localhost port 1234. eg if the Windows box is running a web app you're tell your browser to go to http://localhost:1234/ To do this you need to run SSH first, and the connection will go away once the SSH session is closed.

You can also tunnel a SOCKS proxy:

ssh -D 3456 snipped-for-privacy@raspberrypi.my.house

and then configure Windows / browser / etc to use the SOCKS proxy on localhost port 3456. This will allow connection to all machines on your network as if you were there.

It is also possible to have the Pi permanently port forward, but for that you expose the Windows machine to every attacker on the internet. SSH is designed for that and is probably more secure.

Another option is to run a VPN server on the Pi and connect to it via a VPN client, which allows you into your home network. Wireguard is a simple and efficient VPN, or OpenVPN has some ways to get around ISP blocking of VPNs.

Theo

Cool, thanks, I will try that out and see if it works.

IF you can get it, spend a few extra $$$ on a static IP. Makes things a LOT easier.

To deal with dynamic IPs ... first off there are $$$ services. Basically they monitor your real IP, then update DNS servers to match per change.

However I don't like paying extra $$$, or giving commercial entities too much access/info.

So, I wrote a little Python sockets daemon that polls for a coded packet from the dest - plus one for the dest that detects an IP change and sends it on via the tiny packet over a selected port. The client polls this port, and uses the packet to update the current IP address. A 'personal' version of DDNS utils. Not 'public' however, no providers DNS nums are changed. COULD be in theory though ...

If I can find it in The Mess I could post the daemon/poller code. Not very flexible, but it worked ok for years. Thing is, the desired target for the IP daemon WAS a static IP. For broader use you'd have to have the same or post the info elsewhere (a provider acct that offers ssh access to a file maybe.

There are free DNS services that support dynamic DNS (eg he.net), and most domain registrars provide DNS with the domain including dynamic entries.

All the "big" services quit offering free versions a long time ago. DynDNS was good. But now ... $$$

Obscure services, um ... don't want them in my boxes and it was funner to kinda write my own.

no-ip is still around and still free, joined these days by dynu, afraid.org, duckdns and clouddns all of which provide much the same service as dyndns used to. If you have a domain registered then there's the registrar and he.net.

The only thing that goes in your box is the daemon that registers changes of IP address, many of them publish the details so you can write your own.

Fair enough that's always a good reason.

afraid.org works very well for $0

I have a script called by cron every 15mins

#! /bin/bash

wget -O -

... and I use it successfully. Also dynv6.com for IPv6 DDNS (I have two entries).

David

DO gloss over the source code, just in case :-)

I'm inclined to NOT trust 3rd-party daemons these days. If anyone is offering $0 services, well, HOW do they stay in biz ???

BTW, the code needed for a dynamic DNS daemon should be quite SHORT. I know this because I've writ my own more than once. If your "free" service is hundreds or thousands of lines then BEWARE.

Just sayin'

Gloss over wget's source code? Because that is the only one mentioned here. no daemons, just plain wget. And I got an example with curl. Installed by the OS

I blocked the nym changing troll sometime back. At first I thought it was someone's AI experiment. But it's too full of s*it and wrong so much of the time that even AI isn't that dumb.

Feelings of inadequacy dude ? :-)

Wget and the daemons for dynDNS and friends are very different things BTW.

And hmmmm ... when IS the last time anyone actually DID look-over wget's source code ??? The best place to hide evil is inside something deemed "old and reliable" .....

No they are not - every dynamic dns service I know of updates in essentially the same way, you make an http(s) request with the domain, an authentication key and optionally the IP address (otherwise it uses the source). Usually curl or wget is used to make the request, it is good practice to minimise the requests by checking for IP changes but not necessary. My ddns daemon looks like this:

#!/bin/sh old_external='' while true do external_ip=`fetch -q -o -

And then there are DNS providers which accept RFC1996 compliant NOTIFY transactions, rather than rolling their own ...

That's for relaying updates from master to slave DNS servers not for announcing a change of dynamic IP to the master.

Are you saying you are looking into EVERY package's source code you download via apt BEFORE you install it? Or are you saying that one should do it?

Sounds bit hysterical to me.

You do know that both wget and curl are provided by debian based (and most other ) distribution via their repository tool ?

If you don't trust your distribution, you should switch, or roll your own distribution. But then - I guess you have lots of work ahead of you verifying/looking over source code ...

Not hard to build a simple wget clone using libcurl

Well yes libcurl does all the work.

Of course not - but I was referring to that if you don't trust the binaries from your distribution, then you'd need to check ALL source code. Not only wget/curl - but everything from kernel all the way to web browsers

Either you trust your distribution or not.