Open Sesame

Opening the PI to the World

The Strategy

Because the Raspberry PI is apart of my home network, it is inaccessible by anything that's not connected to the same network.

To allow OpenSesame API to be accessed from anywhere in the world, the following was implemented:

1. Create an AWS EC2 instance with inbound rules set to:

Type	Protocol	Port Range	Source
Custom TCP	TCP	8000	0.0.0.0/0
Custom TCP	TCP	8000	::/0
SSH	TCP	22	0.0.0.0/0
SSH	TCP	22	::/0

And Outbound rules set to:

Type	Protocol	Port Range	Source
All TCP	TCP	0 - 65535	0.0.0.0/0
All TCP	TCP	0 - 65535	::/0

2. Create an autossh tunnel between the PI and the EC2 instance

The Execution

Running the following command will allow the Raspberry PI to be accessed from anywhere.

• autossh -N -R *:8000:127.0.0.1:8000 user@publically-accessible-ip -i "foo.pem"

However, for Ubuntu servers, the following command will automatically bind port 8000 to the local IP, so 127.0.0.1 instead of the publically accessible IP.

To get around this, you can enable the GatewayPorts option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

...
#AllowAgentForwarding yes
#AllowTcpForwarding yes
GatewayPorts yes
X11Forwarding yes
#X11DisplayOffset 10
#X11UseLocalhost yes
#PermitTTY yes
...