Is there anyway to do a point-to-site connection with an Android device as the "point"?

I have a TN5250 client on my Android and would like to connect to our AS/400. There's no AS/400 NeoRouter client (as far as I know!) so I would need to connect *through* the NeoRouter client running on a PC.

Is this possible?

Hi SeanF,

NR client does not support AS/400 yet, so you may want to think about the workarounds as following:

1.Connect to it through a NR client running on a PC (as you said)

2.Setup a proxy server on a PC with NR client running, but you can use the real IP of the AS/400. If the client app (on Android) does not support proxy, you can use the tool, such as TunnelEx, which supports tcp/udp mapping)

3.point-to-site
To enable it on your Android phone, you may need to create file /data/data/com.neorouter.android/files/Feature.ini and configure it properly. ( we don't recommend this for normal users)

Thanks,
KevinZ - NeoRouter team

Kevin, thanks for the reply. Correct me if I'm wrong, but option 3 would require I be rooted, correct? Would I only need to root temporarily in order to create the file, and then NeoRouter would use it even if I un-rooted? (I ask because there are "temporary" root programs that give you root access but then revert back to normal when the phone is rebooted)

I had an additional thought, and am wondering if it would be possible (or useful!) to work this into a future release of the Android NeoRouter client. I'm not up to speed enough to know for sure what the correct terminology for all this would be, though.

Consider a typical point-to-site sample configuration: You have computer 1, which is the "point" computer, with an NR address of 10.0.0.1. You have computer 2, which serves as the NR client on the "site" network, with an NR address of 10.0.0.2 and a physical address of 192.168.0.1. Then there's Computer 3, with no NR client and a physical address of 192.168.0.2. We won't bother detailing the various feature.ini or route settings that go on each machine.

Let's call this scenario 1: When computer 1 wants to communicate with computer 3, it sends the data to computer 2, which routes it on to computer 3. Computer 3's response goes back to 2, which routes it back to 1.

So now we add computer 4, which is an Android device with an NR IP of 10.0.0.3. Currently, we can communicate with computer 2 by setting up port forwarding. For example, our android RDP application accesses localhost:32973 and the NR client intercepts that and sends it to 10.0.0.2:5900. The NR client then receives the response from 10.0.0.2 and routes it back to the application at localhost:32973.

So what I'm thinking is that we have an additional port forwarding option that could be configured to send routed data to the other NR computer.

In other words, the Android NR client would be told to watch for localhost:32973 and send it to 10.0.0.2 with a final destination of 192.168.0.2:5900.

In this scenario, computer 2 would be doing the same thing it did in scenario 1 - acting as a router between another NR client and computer 3.

The only difference in the Android client is that instead of sending data to computer 2 saying "this data is for you," the Android client would send data to computer 2 saying "this data is for 192.168.0.2 - please forward it."

Would something like that work?

I found a workaround.

This guy has a free little utility that lets you do port-forwarding on a Windows XP machine.

So I put that utility on my PC with NeoRouter and set it up to forward port 23 to the AS/400.

Then on my phone I set up a NeoRouter dynamic port forwarding to forward localhost:32973 to $NRIPAddress:23

I start up my phone's TN5250 and connect to localhost:32973. NeoRouter forwards the connection to my XP machine at work, which forwards it to the AS/400.

Bada-bing, bada-boom, works great!

Requires that extra piece of software on the XP machine, but that's no big deal. Only bad thing is that the port forwarding software doesn't run as a Windows service. So, when my XP machine is rebooted, I need to log in to it and manually start the port forwarding before I can connect directly to the AS/400.

Unless I'm mistaken, this process should also work for any other resource on non-NeoRouter hardware that one might want to connect to from NeoRouter Android.