Access WebGuide4 from the web

Last week I installed WebGuide4, a great application if you want to get access to your Windows Media Center from the web.

My MCE runs on an internal computer in my network at home. I also have a web server (IIS6) hosting mye web pages. Since I onlye have one IP-address to my ADSL-router, I hade to find a way to get access to WebGuide, without using a different post that port 80. Why, you may wonder? I didn't want to access WebGuide using an address like: www.mydomain.com:8080. A much sexier way is to create an alias and access the regular pages on: www.mydomain.com and the WebGuide on webguide.mydomain.com.

Ok, so far, so good! But - the WebGuide software is running on a different box than my regular pages. The solution: Install a Reverse Proxy on the webguide-alias on the IIS server.

After some googeling I found a Reverse Proxy that had all the features I needed: ManagedFusion Rewriter. This software have all the features the mod_rewrite module in Apache has.

I also had to install IIS on my MCE, because the Cassini web server included in the WebGuide setup did not work with the reverse proxy. A description on how to set up IIS, is described in the FAQ on the WebGuide pages.

If I access my webguide.mydomain.com now, my IIS6-installation is taking the request, then proxies it down to my MCE-machine. The IIS7 installation on my MCE machine sends the result back to the proxy, that sends it to the client.

I can now access my webguide, even from my mobile, without having to remember any port numbers or anything else...