STEAM STREAMING

steam streaming -> steaming

INTRODUCTION

When reading this blogpost about running a gaming PC in the cloud
I wanted to do that myself, just not on AWS, since I already own a gaming rig.
I did more-or-less the same setup, connectivity-wise, and am now able to connect with my PC!

This is essentially the same setup as the blogpost, but you'll use the steaming
script instead of up.sh and down.sh. It will probably work for the AWS setup as well

REQUIREMENTS

• server: a windows PC, reachable via port-forwarding
• client: a linux pc (mac might work, if you can get the dependencies)

SETUP

Server

Install openvpn on your windows PC; use the 64 bit version, unless your PC is 32 bits.
Please install all components

Copy server.ovpn to C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\server.ovpn

Client

Download these files to your client (select "download as zip") and extract them.

Copy to following files from C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\easy-rsa\keys\ on the server to /etc/openvpn/ on your client:

• ca.crt
• client.crt
• client.key

Change the following in client.ovpn:

• MY_HOSTNAME into the IP or domain name of the router/windows pc

Copy client.ovpn to /etc/openvpn/client.ovpn

Open port 1194/UDP on your router, and point it to your windows PC
Look up "port forwarding YOUR_ROUTER_MODEL_HERE" if you don't know how to do this

Copy the client script steaming to /usr/local/bin/steaming

Install these tools on the client:

• route
• grep
• awk
• head
• kill
• pkill
• openvpn
• ifconfig
• tshark
• script
• xxd
• socat

For debian/ubuntu:

sudo apt install net-tools grep coreutils procps openvpn tshark bsdutils vim-common socat

Certificates

You can generate them on either windows or on linux. No need to run both.

Windows

Open a powershell window and run the following commands:

cd C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\easy-rsa
init-config
vars
clean-all
build-ca			(leave all answers blank)
build-key-server server	(leave all answers blank except Common Name "server", yes to Sign and yes to Commit)
build-key client		(leave all answers blank except Common Name "client", yes to Sign and yes to Commit)
build-dh
robocopy keys ../config ca.crt dh1024.pem server.crt server.key

Linux

Install easy-rsa from https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/releases extract, enter the extracted directory and run the following:

./easyrsa init-pki

# choose a password of at least 4 charachters for your root CA
# you can press enter on all other questions
./easyrsa build-ca 

# the first password is a new one for your server private key
# the second one is the password for your root CA
./easyrsa build-server-full server

# the first password is a new one for your client private key
# the second one is the password for your root CA
./easyrsa build-client-full client

./easyrsa gen-dh

Move the files

Make sure you put these files in the correct locations, note that ca.crt is needed on both sides

filename	location on server	location on client
ca.crt	C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\ca.crt	/etc/openvpn/ca.crt
dh.pem	C:\Program Files\OpenVpn\config\dh1024.pem	-
server.crt	C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\server.crt	-
server.key	C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\server.key	-
client.crt	-	/etc/openvpn/client.crt
client.key	-	/etc/openvpn/client.key

Put the password of your client's private key in /etc/openvpn/pass

CONNECT

start openvpn server on your PC (tray icon->connect) you may have to import the configuration for the first time

Run this script on the client:

sudo steaming --debug

Why?

I made this because the up.sh in the blogpost is mac specific and didn't work on my laptop.

As it turns out, nc (short for netcat) on OSX can do something that ubuntu's nc can't do.
After trying out all variations (netcat-openbsd, netcat-traditional), I looked up the manpage of the OSX version which clarified why it didn't work in linux: on OSX, the -b flag binds nc to an interface; on linux, the -b flag enables broadcasting and then tries to parse the interface name as a hostname, and the hostname as a port, and fails.

I then replaced nc with socat and after some fiddling got it to work nicely. 🙂