Softsqueeze 3.9

Softsqueeze SSH Tunneling Howto

by Thomas B. Malsbury
Many people use Softsqueeze and SSH Tunneling so that they can listen to their music collection over the net. This is now really easy to do using the integrated ssh tunneling in Softsqueeze.

To successfully use the SSH tunneling features of Softsqueeze you need to have the following things in place:

An SSH server running on the same machine as your Slimserver
A Router/Firewall listening to a specific port for SSH (Typically port 22)
A Router/Firewall forwarding that port to the machine running SSH and Slimserver

It seems pretty straight forward, but setting everything up to work may be a challenge. Here are some resources for getting SSH up and running on different operating systems:

Windows

OpenSSH for Windows seems to be a popular and free method for running OpenSSH on a Windows machine. It is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshwindows. It is a command line program that installs a minimal Cygwin environment, enough to run OpenSSH. A good resource for setting up OpenSSH for Windows and configuring users is http://www.vbmysql.com/articles/ssh-tunnel-part2.html. Steps 1-6 are applicable to this project.

If you already have a full version of Cygwin installed, OpenSSH for Windows will not be compatible with the previous install. However, you can add OpenSSH to a Cygwin install. An article at http://tech.erdelynet.com/cygwin-sshd.html walks you through it.

There are also many shareware and commercial SSH Servers available.

OS X

OpenSSH is installed natively in OS X. However, it needs to be configured to run as a service. This can be done from the command line.

Secure Shell Helper (http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/sshhelper.html) is a GUI for setting up and configuring OpenSSH within OS X. The site also provides a helpful setup guide, http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/SSHHOWTO/SSH-HOWTO.html, which walks through the install of Secure Shell Helper and the configuration of an OpenSSH server.

Linux/BSD

Most Linux and BSD distros have SSHD running by default. It is recommended that you make a few changes to the default configuration. A good guide to basic SSHD setup can be found at: http://geodsoft.com/howto/ssh/servers.htm.