Original LXSeries Forum

This great function is the closest thing to a halfdone commercial iPhone app I´ve ever seen.
It works well and it´s simple to understand.

Give it a Live window with a big fat GO-button plus the abilitity to scroll channelvalues high and low and it´s a hit!
I hereby preorder the first copy.

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Since I´m a lightdesigner and not a computergeek I wonder if I could test this from outside my network and therefore have to ask:

Do you have a server standing somewhere with sharing on?

Or, what would be better, can I invite a friend to my local home-network?

I guess that would mean giving away the IP to my local WAN router and maybe also open it for guests plus handling out the IP to the machine within that LAN running LXconsole on port number 51667

Can that be set to work?

I´d like to try using LXConsole as part of a "smart home solution" for a friend who is building a theatre and already uses LXConsole and the Enttec USB DMX pro.
Controlling a bunch of DMXrelays and some dimmed lights with this shouldn´t be a problem I think!

Greetings from the cold north getting warmer every day.

And as it is a webthing any computer/OS can utilize LXConsole or LXBeams. I tried Vista a couple of minutes ago.
Regards

Since I´ve updated borh my iPhone and LXConsole I can´t use this function with the iPhone anymore.
And I wonder why.

If I activate the external sharing on a network I can open the windows from LXConsole with any laptop I may have at hand and in any browser. That works just fine.

But writing the very same address in my iPhone leads nowhere.

Guess this is an iPhone question, not an LXConsole issue. But still I guess the interface is intended for smartphones and it would be nice if it worked.

I dont understand why this is.
Has anybody else come across this problem?

There may be a firewall issue if the network sharing works with a computer connected to the same network but not one connected through a different network.

On a single computer, you should be able to connect a browser to the network sharing address. However, an external connection may require that you enable the port through the Mac's firewall. On the Mac, the firewall is all or nothing based on the application. In the security->firewall preferences pane, you may need to add LXConsole to the list of software allowed external connections.

There may also be a firewall between the iPhone and the network to which the Mac is connected. In this case, the network administrator would have to open the port for you. For example, in a home wireless network, the wireless router may have a firewall enabled and you would need to use the network administration (probably a web page) to add LXConsole's port number to the firewall's allowed connections.

LXConsole allows you to specify the port number (which should be above 1000 to avoid conflicts with other protocols). However, it actually uses regular TCP/IP and HTTP. So, it is possible to assign the regular HTTP port 80 as long as you don't have another HTTP server running on the computer. (Port 80 may be enabled through the firewall by default.)

Yes port 80 was one of the first I tested but it´s still the same.

And since I bring my own airportstation or use only a local Wlan I figured there must be some kind of problem with the new iPhone version.

I use the iPhone only as a remote control when I´m focusing or checking the lights and never from an external connection.
The same goes for whatever computer I may have used, they've never been outside any firewalls an none of them has ever had any problem connecting to whatever port I may have chosen, but the iPhone nowadays never succeeds.

The issue could also be network address translation (NAT). This would be true if the iPhone was connected to a cellular network and the Mac running LXConsole was on a local wireless network.

The Mac would have an IP address something like 192.168.62.101. This is actually assigned by the router but it is not the IP address on the greater web. Your entire local wireless network actually only has one external IP address. You can find this by opening the System Preferences->Network tab. Select the airport connection from the list on the left and click Advanced. Select the TCP/IP tab. Next to "Router:" will be the external address of your network.

The trick to allowing a computer on a different network (ie the iPhone's cellular connection) to access a service running on your Mac connected to the local wireless network is to use port forwarding. How you do this depends on the administration software (usually a web page) for your router.

Assuming that you assigned LXConsole's network sharing to port 4567, you would set the router's port forwarding so that all connections on port 4567 would get forwarded to your Mac's local IP address which is going to be the one shown by LXConsole's network sharing alert.