Tranquil PC's Weblog

WHS is a great tool for streaming your music files (ie MP3) to locally connected systems (players).

But what about sharing / streaming over the internet ?

I guess there are a few ways to do this, but the easiest for me, was to simply create a VPN – ouch sounds expensive / troublesome ?

Yes, VPNs are generally ‘hard’ even if you are technical – but there is a real simple solution – Hamachi from Logmein

I tried out Hamachi earlier in the year, with no results, but a few weeks ago I installed it again, this time V2 – and guess what it worked, actually not only worked, but ‘just worked’ – easily.

Try it out – it’s free for personal / small network use – get it here ( https://secure.logmein.com/US/products/hamachi2/ )

You need to install the agent on your Home Server, and then on the client PC too.

Once you have both installed simply create a ‘network’ on one machine and get the other machine to join it, you’re almost there.

Now on the player you can MAP a network HDD – based on the Virtual IP address of the Home Server !  Really is as simple as that !

Now enjoy streaming your media to the ‘client’ PC – MP3 streams well, .FLAC struggles a bit, unless you have a good upload connection on the Home Server side.

I used WinAmp as the player.  I ran an index builder, and I was amazed to see >20,000 music files, organised by Album / Track or Artist (yes, all that content could be streamed !)

Now I guess it would be frowned upon to stream this music outside of the home, and even more so to your friends house ! 

But the use of Hamachi(2) to provide a virtual IP address (VPN) between your Home Server and PCs not only provides a Media Link – I tested it to open / use all the office services (data) whilst away from the office !!

General File Access – Local or Remote

If you set your Office file access to be based on \\SERVER\Folderxx – it’s transparent to your PC if you are in or out of the office (or Home office) – if local – then the mapped drives \\SERVER\Folderxx are fast, if you are away \\SERVER\Folderxx looks to the Hamachi virtual IP port to run  – and it works (just a little slower)

Now – wouldn’t it be great to get a Hamachi(2) built into WHS Add In – so that you don’t need to run RDC !!