Got mad networking skillz

I finally sat down last night and did a few things to my home network that I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

A few weeks ago I reconfigured everything to use a single router. I’d been working off a wired plus a wireless router and that was causing all kinds of problems trying to chain them.

First, I went to www.dyndns.com and set up a domain for my network. My router has an automatic feature to ping them whenever my ip changes, so I don’t even need to install one of those other apps that does that.

Then I forwarded port 21 to the Mac Mini and turned on FTP sharing on that. Now I can access all the files on my mini from anywhere.

Then I did port 20 to my laptop. Installed FileZilla FTP server there. Took a bit more fiddling with settings, had to open up that port on the firewall, but finally got that up and running. Now I can access everything on both computers. w00t!

Finally, I installed SlimServer on the Mac, opened up port 9000 and forwarded that to mini. Now I can stream my whole music library over the web! I just have to go to http://domainname.com:9000 and I get the SlimServer admin panel which lists all my songs, albums, artist, even artwork. I can browse, set up playlists, etc. and start streaming it. Then I just set iTunes or Winamp to http://domainname.com:9000/stream.mp3 and it plays whatever I’m streaming from the server. They also have their own Java player, but I didn’t have much success with that. iTunes and Winamp work just fine.
I also wanted to set up a web server, but RCN cable service blocks port 80. Oh well.

All in all it wasn’t too much actual work to set up. Mostly just learning where to go to change what settings, figuring out the firewall stuff, etc. Since I’ll soon be working at an actual office, but sometimes at home, it will be really useful to have full access to all my home stuff. No more calling home to ask the wife to email me file such and such. 🙂