New user: what ports to open in router?

ThinLinc
1

I am a new user and I have installed thinlinc on our linus RHEL8.5 machine… this has the local address 192.168.1.6. I can use Thinlinc to connect to this machine from my mac using the address 192.168.1.6 without problem.
However from home I have to connect to the server with its address: 193.XXX.XXX.XX … and when I do that I get the following

Connection to server: "193… "
Connection to agent: “192.168.1.6”

and then
Connection to server:“192.168.1.6” timed out. Check your settings.

What am I doing wrong - is it just some port that I need to open in the router?

I believe I have the following ports open:
22, 300,5901,5902,1010,9000

I can log into the web interface from outside: https://193.XXX.XXX.XX:9090/network

2

Hello @Crispin

The port you need to open in your router to allow external connections to Thinlinc is port 22 (SSH).

Regarding the message " Connection to server:“192.168.1.6” timed out. Check your settings." is due to fact that Thinlinc VSMServer will instruct your Thinlinc client to make a second SSH connection to the ipaddress of your server, which is 192.168.1.6.

Your client machine must have some way to directly make a connection to this address, and since it’s an internal address, we can work around this by utilizing an SSH tunnel and HOST_ALIASES.

@VirusABC has a great instruction for how he achived this, please see if you can make it work by reading
https://community.thinlinc.com/t/my-personal-thinlinc-use-case-and-some-performance-comparison/173#suggestions-6

With best regards,
Martin

3

Update: If your client machine is running Windows, the configuration for HOST_ALIASES will be different than what is written in link above.

instead of configuring the Thinlinc client configuration in the file tlclient.conf, in Windows this is done in the Windows Registry (with the tool regedit), please see attached screenshot.

After you’ve setup the HOST_ALIAS parameter in the registry and started your ssh tunnel, you should be good to go to connect to 192.168.1.6 in the Server field in the Thinlinc Client

screenshot2
screenshot2999×317 20.1 KB

4

Hello Martin

Many thanks for your quick reply … however I am a bit new to this game so I still have problems.

  1. my external machine is running RHEL7.5 - and I connect to it using Tigervnc from my mac.

  2. I have added this line to the
    “HOST_ALIASES=192.168.0.2:22=localhost:2222” to the tlclient.conf on both the external machine and the server machine that I want to connect to…

  3. I have run the tunnel command on my external machine:
    ssh -L 2222:192.168.1.6:22 username@193.XXX.XXX.XX

and the response is:
username@193XXX.XXX.XX’s password:
Web console: https://localhost:9090/ or https://192.168.1.6:9090/

and I am logged in and remain logged into the server machine…

I then try the thinlinc on the external machine and I get the same time out…

Sorry to be such a novice…

Crispin

5

Sorry I was being stupid: the HOST_ALIASES line should read:
“HOST_ALIASES=192.168.1.6:22=localhost:2222”

and now it works - I can log into my server from outside.

I would be great if this tunnelling could be incorporated into Thinlinc software so that non-experts such as me could have an easier time :blush:

Anyway - I am now a happy user of ThinLinc

6

Hello @Crispin

I’m glad to hear that you solved the issues and made it work!

Best regards,
Martin

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