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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

The guide advocates an EC2 security group that allows everything, plus disabling the Windows firewall. That's quite insecure, and unnecessary.

It's probably better, and not more work, to create a security group that only allows:

* UDP on port 1194 (Openvpn server) * TCP on port 3389 (Remote Desktop) * ICMP (for ping)

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Aren't you leaving out all the networking by the games by doing that? My college was famous for blocking multiplayer starcraft games a new way every week and us students finding a way around it every week. Kind of sad Blizzard eventually sued the B.NET replacement that was needed due to crappy filtering like that.

In most cases, this shouldn't pose any issues (though some games doing crazy things with networking could be affected).

These rules restrict the ports listening directly on the internet. The average gaming PC is behind a home router, has no ports reachable from the internet, and network games still work fine.

If your college was like mine, what they did was filtering outbound connections, which is different. Outbound traffic is unfiltered by default on EC2, and it's fine to leave it that way.

It's probably not a good idea to play any competitive multi-player games on this service anyways, considering the additional latency and higher possibility of interruptions.

Is Openvpn even necessary? Open 3389 to only your IP address in the security group.

Yeah, using OpenVPN allows your client and server to reside on the same subnet, which I presume is necessary for Steam In-Home Streaming.

You need the openVPN for the Steam IHS Lan discovery and upd streaming. With my setup I still use Hamachi which also does the job and was much easier to configure. Downside is that it is proprietary and has phases with extreme paket loss which make playing impossible every now and then.

For this setup, yes - a VPN is necessary to use Steam's inbuilt streaming feature.

The idea is OpenVPN enables IP multicast to be tunneled over the public Interent, which Steam's streaming requires.

you're not playing over rdp; that would be terrible.

you're using steam in-home streaming through the vpn.

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