This section is meant for more advanced users. Casual users can skip reading it.

Remote control allows the StableBit DrivePool user interface to connect to another copy of StableBit DrivePool running on another computer on your network.

Remote control can be enabled or disabled from the Settings menu (See: UI Overview).

When enabled, remote control does the following:

• Open up the necessary ports in the Windows firewall.

• Start up the necessary services in order to facilitate remote control:

  • Discovery - In order to locate network peers.

  • Keep-alive - In order to detect when peers drop off the network.

  • Remoting - In order to securely communicate with the peers.

Disabling remote control reverses all these steps, including closing the ports opened in the firewall.

StableBit DrivePool uses a secure .NET Remoting TCP channel to communicate with the remote peer. This means that authentication is provided using the standard network authentication and authorization system in Windows (GSSAPI/SSPI/Kerberos). No user names / passwords are ever sent in the clear over the network.

All communications are also encrypted for privacy by Kerberos.

In addition, in order to be able to connect to a remote computer, the account that is connecting must be a user on the remote computer, and that user must be part of the built-in Administrators group.

For more details on the various encryption types that Windows uses see: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj852180(v=ws.10).aspx

In order to discover other machines running StableBit DrivePool on the local network, remote control will send out multicast UDP packets to a particular multicast group / port combination. Any copies of StableBit DrivePool on the LAN (with remote control enabled) will pick these up and remember the machine that sent them as a potential candidate to connect to.

In addition, when you shut down your computer, a special shutdown message is sent to inform everyone that the computer is shutting down and it should be removed from the list of available remote control targets.

The multicast packets themselves are tiny. This keeps network congestion to a minimum.

By default StableBit DrivePool uses multicast UDP packets to discover other peers to connect to. Sometimes, due to your network configuration, multicast packets can be dropped by your router.

You can instruct the remote control discovery system to probe specific hosts to see if they are running a copy of StableBit DrivePool. You can do this by editing a XML file that is placed in C:\Program Files\StableBit\DrivePool\RemoteControl.default.xml by default.

You can define your own peers using IP addresses, Windows computer names or domain names. For further instructions just open the XML file in a text editor such as notepad.