Remote access to your Solo

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Remote Access to your SOLO

This article will guide you through the process of configuring your internet connection to provide access to the SOLO’s web interface from any browser on any device, no matter whether you are at the observatory, at home, or anywhere else.

1.The problem

When you have your beautiful observatory away from your home, you will have an internet connection in the observatory itself and another internet connection at home. Each internet connection creates a private network where the devices connected to the router live.

As a result, your SOLO lives peacefully in the private network created by its internet connection and it is not reachable from home.

The arrows here are important to understand the problem:

2.The highway: remote viewers

There is a solution used by many users:

Ok! Done! Yes, kind of. But what if:

Ok, you are convinced. You want to access your SOLO’s web interface from any browser on any device. Let’s see the hard (but better) way.

3.The hard (better) way: publishing your SOLO

We do not need to change the internet connection at home. We only need to change the observatory’s connection to:

Publishing the SOLO’s web interface will turn the blue unidirectional arrow into a green bidirectional one:

…this means we will be able to access the SOLO’s web interface from outside the observatory.

If you feel comfortable with networking terminology such as “IP Address”, “Port”, “Private IP Address” and “Public IP Address”, please skip to Publishing the SOLO’s web interfaces Otherwise, the next section will give a quick review of these terms.

Quick review of networking terminology

You can think of the internet as a postal mail service. Each address has a postal address you can use to find your way to that specific place. What the postal address is in the real world, an IP address is in the internet world. Every computer or device connected to the internet has an IP address.

The same way two different places cannot have the same postal address, two different devices cannot have the same IP address.

What does an IP address look like? It is just a series of four numbers, separated by a dot. For example: 80.3.122.1

Wow, but that is extremely difficult to remember! Don't worry. There is a thing called DNS that associates easier to remember names with their IP address. Do you remember when you type http://aagsolo in your browser to access your SOLO? Well, actually “aagsolo” is a name that corresponds to your SOLO’s IP address. The DNS system takes care of converting that for you. You can think of the DNS system as your address book: you don’t have to remember every person’s address, just look for their name in your address book and you can find it there.

Is the postal address enough for my letter to reach its destination? Well, actually, many postal addresses are buildings in which many people live. So we need some extra information for our letter to be successfully delivered: where, inside the building, the addressee lives.

On the internet, something similar happens. Our computer has an IP address, but it may serve more than one service. It may serve as a backup system, and also as streaming service, and also as network file server and much more. So when I want to talk to the streaming service, an IP address will not be enough. I have to say which service within that IP address I want to talk to. That is the port.

So, in the internet world, in order to communicate with a service, I will need to know its IP address and its port.

The port is nothing more than a numerical value. For example, the SOLO’s standard web is on port 80. So, when I type http://aagsolo in the browser, the browser is:

Public internet and private networks

All we have seen applies to the public internet. But when we are at home with our smartphone connected to our router, we are not on the public internet. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but a strong one is that if we were, what would prevent any malicious person from reaching our smartphones?

Fortunately, when a device is connected to a home router, the device is not exposed on the public internet. The device resides in a private network guarded by the router itself, which is connected to both the public internet and our private network.

You can think of your router as the security guard of the building. Nobody can access the building without going through the Security Guard (the router). In fact, somebody trying to talk to “SOLO” will only speak to the Security Guard (the router).

This is nice because it is secure 🙂 But it makes things complicated for our purpose of publishing the SOLO’s webpage: somebody from outside our private network wanting to see the SOLO’s webpage will never reach SOLO, he will just reach the Security Guard (the router).

How do we fix this? Well, just as in real life. We will have to give some rules to the Security Guard. Let’s see how this is done.

Publishing the SOLO’s web interfaces

The SOLO has two web interfaces: one is reachable using http://aagsolo and displays the well-known weather information, safe status and charts; this is the SOLO’s port 80. The configuration (password protected) web is reachable using https://aagsolo/config (the former is “http” internet service, the later is “https” internet service; “s” stands for “secure”); this is the SOLO’s port 443.

To publish the SOLO’s web interface we will have to publish both services.

Obtaining the SOLO’s IP address

We need to tell the router to redirect some traffic to the SOLO. In order to do so, we need to know the SOLO’s IP address. You will need a PC in your observatory. Open a “CMD” on your PC connected to Observatory’s network:

This will open Windows’ default terminal application. Now type “ping aagsolo” and press the ENTER key.

In this example, the “ping” command is telling us that “aagsolo”’s IP address is “192.168.1.42”. Yours will be different as your router’s configuration will be different.

Adjusting the router configuration

In your router, redirecting traffic from one router’s port to a different device is called NAT (Network Address Translation).

Note: Please keep in mind that we will be changing the router’s configuration and each router brand will have its own interface to do this configuration. We will be showing one specific interface. Yours may differ.

Look for an option called NAT in your router’s configuration and enter information similar to this:

What we are telling the router here is:

“when someone reaches the router on port 8080, redirect the conversation to 192.168.1.42 (SOLO’s IP address) on port 80 (http service)”

Something similar happens for the second rule.

“when someone reaches the router on port 8443, redirect the conversation to 192.168.1.42 (SOLO’s IP address) on port 443 (https service)”

Now, SOLO’s web interface will be reachable from any browser on any device using http://:8080 and configuration interface in https://:8443/config

Determining router’s IP Address

How do you know your router’s IP address? The easiest way know it opening a browser from a PC inside your observatory and going to https://whatismyipaddress.com/

So, in my example, SOLO’s web interface will be reachable using http://80.103.38.22:8080

Name instead of IP address: DynDNS

Remembering a name is easier than remembering four numbers. For example, it is easier to remember “aagsolo” instead of “192.168.1.42”. So let’s look for an easier way to remember router’s IP address.

There are several sites that allow you to assign a name to an IP address. DynDNS is one of the most popular. There are others, like FreeDNS which I will use for this tutorial since it is free, but they all work in a similar way.

After registering, you can go to the “Subdomains” section to register your router’s IP address:

We will not go in detail on what “Type” and “Domain” mean (it is all part of DNS culture and it is quite long to explain), but let’s just say that when we hit “Save!”, the name “mysolo.mooo.com” will be resolved to my router’s IP address: 80.103.38.22, so I will be able to use http://mysolo.mooo.com:8080 to reach my SOLO.

Now, this would be enough if your router had a fixed (static) IP address. But this is not usually the case. Most routers have a dynamic (changing) IP address.

So… all we did in FreeDNS will be useless when the router's IP address changes? Yes, but fortunately most routers have support for DynDNS or similar systems. For example:

If we register our DynDNS/FreeDNS credentials into the router, when its IP address changes, the router itself will notify DynDNS/FreeDNS. Keeping it synchronized, you will not have to worry about what IP address your router has.