This is a note to anyone who’s attempting to stream music from the Firefly media server (formerly ‘mt-daapd’) to iTunes across the ether with a little help from Rendezvous Proxy and an SSH tunnel. Many a fine HOW-TO article has been written on setting up the server for your platform, configuring the proxy on the client machine, and managing the SSH tunnel for the connection, so I won’t bang on about any of that here.
However, if you have followed those instructions to the letter but still find that iTunes fails to connect to the server, check your SSH tunnel configuration and ensure the tunnel’s remote host is specified by IP address 127.0.0.1, not the hostname ‘localhost’.
For example: if you’re creating the tunnel on the command line like this:
ssh -YNf -l username -L 3689:localhost:3689 daapd.example.com
try changing it to this:
ssh -YNf -l username -L 3689:127.0.0.1:3689 daapd.example.com
I have no idea why this distinction should even be apparent to the application (iTunes) that is unwittingly using the tunnel, but—for me at least—it made the difference between connection failures and sweet streaming music. YMMV.
