Accessing Server hosted on USB remotely

Question

I'm running a program called VMlite VNC Server for android on a set of Phones connected via USB to a windows XP machine.

Due to the way we're utilising the phones, we need them unrooted and with Wifi disabled, accessing the internet over a 3g/4g connection.

Currently the way the VMlite VNC server and their app for the local machine they're connected to via USB allows VNC access to the machines over the USB connection. This connection is accessible to the local machine via the network address:

localhost:5901

or over a webbrowser via:

http: //localhost:5801

The ports are configurable, and multiple phones work with a single machine.

The problem is the following: Attempting to access the phones over the network via it's IP address does not work. Eg: http ://192.168.0.193:5801

will not work, nor does accessing the respective address via a VNC client.

All the relevant firewall ports are opened and tested to confirm that they are open.

I've attempted to set up a proxy server on the machine, however that had the problem of not allowing access to websites on Local host.

I've also set up an SSH tunnel between the ports on the local machine and another machine on the network using OpenSSH set up on the XP machine.

Running a wireshark diagnostic on network traffic reveals that when accessing the "http: //localhost:5801" webpage from the machine connected via USB to the phones, there is no traffic sent over tcp/ip. I'm guessing that this is because what the program has done is map the ports 5801 and 5901 to send traffic only to the respective USB devices.

So my question is the following: How do I set up the machine so that I can forward traffic from the USB ports to be accessible across the network? Alternatively is there some kind of browser plugin that allows me to open webpages as if I was viewing them from a different machine on the network?(keep in mind that a typical proxy server set up did not work, as browsing to http ://localhost seems to cause problems)

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you can access the phones from the XP machine ssh port forwarding should work.

if your XP is the sshd server (sounds like it is) you can do something like:

ssh user@l92.168.0.193 -L 192.168.0.193:5081:127.0.0.1:5081 -g

In this case the XP machine is ssh'ing to itself and binding a port forward to the ethernet interface to the localhost (loopback) interface where the USB action is. The -g flag lets ssh accept connections from other machines on the (ethernet) network.

You'll probably want to futz with windows firewall if it's enabled.

Answer 2

If you can access the xp machine, then you should be able to access the phones, we do this all the time.

When the phone is attached to the pc, it is like a part of the computer, you use the computer's ip address, plus the port number you used to forward to the phone.

For example, if you xp IP address is 192.168.1.10, then from another pc, you can get to your phone using this:

192.168.1.10:5801

In other words, you replace localhost with the real IP address of the computer.