Accessing files on Pi over HTTPS

Question

I've installed Baracuda drive on my Raspberry Pi in order to access files located on an attached USB drive from a browser. This works well in my local network and now I want to open a port on my router to access the files via the internet. I want to use an HTTPS connection for obvious reasons, but this is not supported by default.

Baracuda drive has some tunneling software as desribed here, but it doesn't seem to work on a Pi's architecture. I get a:

./MxTunnel: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error

when I try to run it.

So to get HTTPS working, I want to install software called Stunnel. Is this a good way to get my HTTPS connection up and running or are there easier/better alternatives?

Answer 1

No, you cannot use MxTunnel on the pi since I checked MxTunnel out and they provide a pre-compiled binary (which I'm sure is for x86 or x64, not ARM).

Probably the most convenient option (in my opinion) would be SFTP which is FTP with an S on it (which means secure). It's quite easy to set up using vsftpd and a few port forwards. Using Filezilla to access your files surely won't hurt except for the fact that you need that software to access your home files.

Answer 2

You need to compile Stunnel from source; it looks like it is only distributed precompiled for android or x86-64, which is not uncommon. Fortunately there is a .tar.gz package on their downloads page.

Open that up:

tar -xzf stunnel-5.30.tar.gz

Then:

cd stunnel-5.30
./configure --help

This will show you some options but they are probably not very interesting. The only one you need to use is --with-gnu-ld and even that is usually irrelevant.

You will need some stuff installed first; on Raspbian at least:

apt-get install gcc
apt-get install make
apt-get install libssl-dev

Then from within the unpacked directory try:

./configure --with-gnu-ld
make
make test

The last one may not happen, try make check if it doesn't. If neither one works don't worry about it.

Finally:

sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

I'm not sure that sudo make works (it really shouldn't...but that's tangential). You may need to su root instead to run make install.