ASA5505 and Slimserver? Sharing music over a wan?

November 30, 2008 8:54 AM

I have a very large music collection. For Christmas I was thinking of getting my parents an ASA5505 and a Squeezebox Duet. I already have an ASA5505, and setting up a hardware VPN should be trivial. We both have 15x15 lines, speed should not be an issue.

I noticed my parents had like 30 lame songs they got from iTunes and were slowly trying to digitize their vinyl collection. I pretty much have anything they could ever want in mp3 form and nicely organized with a Slimserver serving up to my head units. I figure this should work in theory, especially given that my parents (!) have a fiber 15x15 line. Well I do too, and since we're on the same provider's network, I can't imagine more than a couple of geographic hops on a router.

What say you Metafilter? Has anyone tried this? It should work in theory, right? Any ideas?

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Do you or your parents ever plan to move? Sounds like this could work well now, but might be a very temporary gift...
posted by rikschell at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2008

It's illegal, but presumably you know that and that's why you're posting anonymously. Depending on your provider (I'm guessing Verizon) they may or may not care about that. You're also going to have to do some NAT forwarding tricks that would slightly compromise your home security on standard home networking gear, but the ASA5505 looks like it could handle the VPN trivially and deal with that. As you predicted, it's going to depend on the hops between your network and theirs -- why not run some tests and see what the ping times are like. Streaming MP3s actually doesn't take that much bandwidth.

On the other hand, why not just copy your collection to a big harddrive and give them that? Wouldn't that be cheaper than the Cisco and a cleaner long term solution?
posted by The Bellman at 10:00 AM on November 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

Why even go that far?
I have previously (because it was cool) had a Slimserver that I connected to from a Squeezebox one hundred miles away. Both ends had a 768Kb/s DSL connection. It worked fine (but I had to put a password on the server).
posted by ooklala at 12:49 PM on November 30, 2008

I'm not really even sure that the VPN is required, although it might be the easiest way to set it up. (I've done iTunes over a WAN ... it used to be very easy, then Apple intentionally broke it so you need some relatively ugly hacks to make it work. Since the Squeezebox presumably isn't cripped in the same way iTunes is, you ought to be able to just forward the appropriate ports, set yourself up with a DynDNS hostname, and set your parents up to connect.)

But the VPN would be more secure and might make the configuration easier.

The only time I've tried doing something like this, I discovered that it was made *much* easier if you have each end of the network on a different subnet.

E.g., if you use 192.168.0.* addresses, set your parents so that they use 192.168.1.* (which if everything on their end is connected via DHCP is pretty trivial; you just change the addresses that are given out and wait for the leases to expire). Then you can just use your VPN boxes in "bridge" mode and you should be able to pass traffic between the LANs. (Some modification to the routing tables of your routers may be required if they're not too smart.)

If you both use the same subnet and mask, you'll have address collisions and will have to introduce an additional layer of NAT in between the networks ... that is almost certainly not something you want to do, since it breaks end-to-end connectivity from any computer on one side of the network to any computer on the other (which is the whole point of the VPN).
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:51 PM on November 30, 2008 [2 favorites]