HOWTO: Remotely Access your Folding Systems - Part 4 Tunneling Madness

Gorgon · June 4, 2022

So you have remote systems Folding for you out on the Internet and want to monitor them remotely? Exposing the Web Control (TCP 7396) or Advanced Control (TCP 36330) ports can be problematic as neither protocol is encrypted and is thus susceptible to interception of your data.

A better solution is to use SSH Port-Forwarding or Tunneling.

The following example is for monitoring from a Windows System at home to a remote Linux system using the PuTTY SSH Client on the Windows system to create a encrypted SSH Tunnel between the Local Windows System and Remote Linux System and was inspired by this post here.

On the Windows system create a PuTTY Saved Session for the Remote Host:

Don't forget to click "Add"

Here we are forwarding the Web Control Port on the Linux System (7396) to the same port on the Windows System so we can run Web Control or the LAR Systems Client.

Run this PuTTY session.

Open https://client.foldingathome.org or https://127.0.0.1:7396

See the Results from the Linux System:

NOTE: You can only do this for a single system as the LAR Systems Client used the https://client.foldingathome.org URL that re-directs to localhost:7396 (127.0.0.1:7396). You could redirect other systems to other ports on the Windows system but only the one using Port 7396 will be visible to the LAR Systems Client. Re-directed systems using alternate ports can only be accessed through a browser.

For example, here is another remote system we are re-redirecting to Local Port 7392 on the Windows System:

But here the LAR Systems Client won't work as you can not change the Port for it but you can still access this system using the "native" address of the Windows system 127.0.0.1:7392:

The same method can be used fo tunnel the Advanced Control port (TCP 36330) from a remote Linux Systems to local ports for use with the Advanced Control or HfM.net.

Part 1 - FAH Control

Part 2 - HfM.net

Part 3 - F@H Mobile Monitor