Wireless Ad-Hoc Port Forwarding? (desktop, server, wifi, install)

[Konraden]

I'll walk you through real quick what I have set up and what I'm trying to do.

My desktop is connected via LAN to the router (set up on 192.168.1.x), and the LAN is a shared connection with the desktop's wireless connection. Instead of getting an iffy signal between my phone's Wifi antenna and my home router, I figured it would be significantly easier to just Ad-Hoc my desktop's wireless and my phone, and run the internet that way--except I have a small(ish) problem.

On my phone is a remote for VLC media player, which uses VLC's web-interface to work. Normally, I just connected to the router with my phone, and it would connect through the static IP on my desktop. However, when I ad-hoc the connection, my phone receives the IP address of 192.168.137.2 (x.1 being the desktop wireless), and it can't access my desktop's IP connection--and I have no idea why. Is there a way to port-forward the Ad-Hoc connection, so that incoming requests on my desktop's wireless (which would be my phone's outgoing) would forward to my desktop's LAN?

My description isn't the best, but lacking a flow-chart, it's a little hard to put into words.

[MediocreButArrogant]

It could be that the VLC web interface is only listening for connections on the 192.168.1.0 network, and not the 192.168.137.0 network. If you know the port number, you can check with the "netstat" command in a command window. There may be a preference setting in VLC to specify which network(s) to listen for connections when the host is multihomed.

[MediocreButArrogant]

I played with VLC a little today. By default, the web interface only accepts connections from localhost (127.0.0.1). There is a file in the VLC install directory called http/.hosts. It controls what foreign hosts can access the web interface. I had to edit it to allow LAN access to the web interface. You must have edited that file at one time to get your phone's remote control app to work. You probably need to edit it to allow access from the other (Ad-Hoc) network. I actually was able to access the web server from the LAN before editing the .hosts file, but the server gave a "403 Forbidden" error - meaning the server is listening on all interfaces, but then examines the request once it comes in to see where it originated, rather than not listen at all on an interface if the permissions don't allow it.