LinuxMCE includes a web interface that allows you to control your home system from the internet or from a mobile phone, including receiving security alerts, scheduling TV shows to record and so on. The biggest problem is that this is not safe. Data sent over the internet is generally not encrypted, and easy to intercept. So if you login to your LinuxMCE system at home, strangers can intercept your username and password and take over your home system. Banking and e-commerce is safe because the companies providing those services invest in SSL certificates, which are used to securely encrypt all data from your browser to their server. You know you are using a safe, secure web page when the URL starts with https:// instead of http://. But very few home users will invest in obtaining an SSL certificates. Fiire provides a way for your home LinuxMCE system to make a secure, encrypted connection to our server that nobody else can listen in on, and then allows you to login to our secure server which will patch you through to your home system with a strong, encrypted connection the entire way.

This service also overcomes two additional obstacles to remotely accessing your LinuxMCE system. Firstly, your internet provider probably does not give you a static IP address, so you have no way to access your home system. And even if they do, most residential internet providers do not allow you to run a web server from home and will block all incoming traffic to the web server in your LinuxMCE system. Fiire's remote access service overcomes both of these limitations so you will always be able to access your home system.

The cost of the service is only $3/month, and includes unlimited access to your home system. Imagine the peace of mind of being able to know 24/7 from anywhere in the world that your home is secure.

This service will be online on August 31, 2007.

Technical details of how this works: After signing up for this service we provide you a URL that points to the Fiire remote access software. You go into your LinuxMCE admin panel and choose Advanced, Add Software to add this to your system. The software creates a 2048-bit RSA public/private for your system, and exchanges public key with Fiire's server over a secure socket connection (ssh/scp). The software will then install a daemon on your system that makes a secure connection over ssh to Fiire's server whenever your system is online. We then provide you a secure URL to login to Fiire's server, at which point we route all traffic back to your home system using the ssh tunnel, so it is always encrypted. You can then access any of the web sites on your home system, including the admin site, mythweb, and the WAP site for mobile phones. You can also pass your Fiire username and password on the URL to our secure server so you can bookmark the specific pages on protected computers and browsers, like your mobile phone, and access them securely without having to login each time.