I'm working on a personal project that involves a Beaglebone blue. I want to access it remotely from anywhere. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is. I know I could just forward a corresponding port (unsafe) or something along those lines but I want to avoid too many security flaws. The board controls a camera which I plan on displaying in a UI that also allows me to move the camera around. There are so many companies that have devices that can be controlled from anywhere...so how do I?
3 Answers
There are a lot of solutions for this question. I will mention a few.
In general your device should either:
Have a public ip (if your infra allows it and your ISP provides this service), and then you can access it directly.
Connect to an online server using some service:
- Using VPN. Connecting your device to an openVPN server (I think this is the most popular solution). Wiregurd is also quite popular
- Using consul or etcd or similar service for its service discovery feature
- Using a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) IoT service products
So let me post my comments as a coherent answer. Assuming you have a dynamic IP but otherwise unrestricted access to it from public Internet:
- Make sure your router always gives the BB the same address in LAN
- Install your Web UI and other stuff on BB
- Configure SSH server on BB to accept only key-based authentication, no passwords (
PasswordAuthentication noin/etc/ssh/sshd_config). - Generate a keypair in your PC and give your public key to the BB (in
/home/<youruser>/.ssh/authorized_keys). Ensure key-based SSH logins works in local network before proceeding. - Subscribe to a dynamic DNS service with a Linux client that runs on ARM. Install the client on BB.
I use No-IP, where the client comes as source code and probably compiles on BB (haven't tested). It's a bit annoying as you have to re-activate your free subscription once a month, maybe there are better services. - In your router forward a random external port (8822, 62222, pick a mnemonic) to the BB-s IP and port 22.
- Remotely SSH into the BB using your dynamic DNS and external port (e.g. myhome.no-ip.org:62222). While testing in your LAN, note some routers support a "hairpin" connection to the public IP from inside the LAN, some don't.
Don't forget to configure your SSH client to activate local port 80 forwarding in the client (-L 80:localhost:80in command line, similar in Putty GUI) - While the SSH link is up, you can access the Web UI running in BB from your local PC on address
http://localhost:80(securely tunneled through the SSH connection).
You could use something like Remote.it to connect to your beagle bone. There is a guide for raspberry pi's that can probably be adapted for the beagle bone.
Additionally, if you know python, you could use Adafruit.io as a basic control unit. I set it up once to execute commands that I posted, and it gave me the result a few seconds later. Good Luck!
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