Clueless Wonder

So I’m going to be changing jobs next week. As part of the switch, part of my workweek I’m going to be in an environment where I won’t be able to have my iPhone or iPod with me. That is unfortunate as probably 50% or more of my day is spent listening to different podcasts while I work.

I found PulpTunes by searching on Google. It seemed to solve all of my problems! Then I realized that there are some features that won’t work for me, namely you cannot set the port to be less than 1080. That is a non-starter for me as my work has almost every non-standard port blocked. I needed a way to make it use port 80, which is the standard port for web pages.

After searching the forums, I found that the mod_proxy module for Apache would do internal port forwarding for me. For a quick and easy install of Apache on my Mac I turned to the free MAMP install. It’s far and away the quickest, cleanest way to get Apache running quickly on a Mac. After Apache was installed, I needed to ensure that the proxy modules were loaded by ensuring that the following lines were in my conf file:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

I then needed to add the following lines at the end of my conf file to pick the port and alias to forward. In this case, the default port of 15000 for PulpTunes and using the same name for the folder alias.

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /pulptunes http://localhost:15000
ProxyPassReverse /pulptunes http://localhost:15000

After this, I restarted Apache to invoke the new settings. Next up was ensuring that port 80 was being forwarded to the internal network ip address of the machine I was serving from. To also clean things up a bit, I used the free Dock Dodger program to remove PulpTunes from my dock, only showing in my taskbar.

Now I can access all my my music from just about any internet connected machine! There’s a user account feature in PulpTunes so that I don’t get just anybody using up my bandwidth, I can access my playlists, and even rate the songs. It’s a great solution and I suggest you try it.