Sorry for the noob question. I'm considering getting the Tinypilot Voyager 2. What I'm trying to do is be able to access a friends PC via KVM from a different country, so over the internet. Obviously if the whole thing only works within a LAN that's not possible and I would waste my money. So does it work and if no, would you guys know how you could set something like that up? Any help is appreciated!
Diego @diegoHello @Klikong !
Yes it is possible. While TinyPilot does not yet natively support remote access from outside your local network, there are a variety of third-party tools that can enable this. Please check the following document in our FAQ: How can I access my TinyPilot device over the Internet?
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Hey Diego, thank you so much for your reply and sorry for the late response
I did end up buying the Tinypilot and my friend set it up in his country. It took us (mainly him) a lot of time to figure everything out as we were both absolute beginners in this space, but we got it to work using remote.it.
My problem now is, that the lag is really terrible. We live on other sites of the globe so some lag was to be expected, but I'm talking about 500 ping regularly and 10-30 second lag spikes every 5-10 minutes or so. Sometimes I also loose control over the mouse and I have to reapply the video settings to get it to work again. I played around with the video settings as much as I could, and generally the lower I tune it the better it gets, which suggests to me it is a bandwidth problem, but even at 3 FPS and 10 MJPEG quality it is barely useable.
We also tried setting up Tailscale and Zerotier, as your matrix suggests they will provide better performance, but tbh we just didn't have the technical Knowhow to set it up.
The internet speed of both our local networks is quite high so I doubt that is the problem. If I had to guess the "weak link" in the chain is therefore remote.it but maybe I'm missdiagnosing the problem so I'd be very interested in your take on the issue. I also signed up for the TinyPilot Cloud Early Access today, do you guys already have a timeline on the release?
I would appreciate any feedback a lot as this thing is super important to me. Cheers
Diego @diegoHello @Klikong! Welcome back, no worries about the late response. I do apologize as well, for taking so long to reply.
I'm sorry to hear you are having latency issues. Unfortunately, if you have already tried with such low video settings, and you still have a high latency, then there isn't much more you can do (from the Tinypilot point of view). The bottleneck does indeed seem to be remote.it
I would definitely suggest you to give Tailscale a try, as it improves latency over remote.it. It is not that difficult to setup. I recently wrote an article about Tailscale, it explains how to install it. Let me know if you have any questions about it.
Regarding TinyPilot Cloud Early Access, I'm afraid to report we have gotten fewer signups than we were expecting, so we’ve put that project on hold. It’s still on our roadmap, but we don’t have a launch date yet.
Just wanted to say: Switching to Tailscale worked. While the ping is still quite high, the lag spikes are basically gone. Maybe this helps some other users as well.
- Diego @diego
Thank you @Klikong for the update! Have a great day!
- In reply todiego⬆:F@ffaabbiieenn
Hello @diego ,
I am now using KVM from Adder (via VNC) and to avoid latency issues, I put VNC on very low colors (8 colors).
This is really sufficiant for me. Is there a way to do so with TinyPilot ? May be is that possible via SSH to set the whole tinypilot system on low colors ? It would be great for my use.
Thanks.
Fab
David @david2022-09-30 19:43:26.583ZHi Fab, thanks for the question!
TinyPilot doesn't have a low color mode. But we do have a guide for reducing latency if you need some additional performance gains.
In reply toKlikong⬆:Jim Walls @K6CCCI'm looking into the Voyager 2. Curious if the different network restriction is an intended decision for security, or the device is incapable of routing? If it is reachable via an IP address, I would think it should be reachable via a port forward. Yes, there are security issues with that, but I can deal with that quite well in my router / firewall.
On the other hand, although I don't today, I will soon have ZeroTier available (requires a router firmware upgrade to support it)...- CCharles Hague @cghague2022-10-26 21:06:26.316Z
Hi Jim - thanks for your question about using TinyPilot on different networks!
You can access your TinyPilot from outside your network if you configure your router to forward an external port to 443 on your TinyPilot (or port 80 if you’ve disabled the HTTPS requirement).
We don’t recommend configuring your network this way, as it drastically increases the TinyPilot’s attack surface. If an attacker port scans the Internet and finds your TinyPilot web interface, then it means that you're vulnerable to brute force attacks on your TinyPilot credentials as well as undiscovered security vulnerabilities in TinyPilot or any of the components in our tech stack (nginx, Flask, etc.).
As an alternative, we recommend using a third-party remote access solution. We’ve listed several free options on our website with tutorials showing how to configure them with TinyPilot. The advantage of those services is that they’re designed to withstand attacks from the public Internet, and they expose a much smaller and more difficult target for an attacker to compromise.
Jim Walls @K6CCCThanks for the answer. That was somewhat what I expected - although there are ways to make the traffic un-routable.
I agree that you certainly would not want to simply port forward port 443 (or worse, port 80) to the TinyPilot without addition security in the router. But that part I can handle. However as noted earlier, I will have ZeroTier available before too long.