Backend/ front end. I see those a lot but I never got an explanation for it. In my case, the backend would be Ollama on my rig, and the front end would be me using it on my phone, whether that’s with and app or web ui. Is that correct?

For Web-based LLM setups, it’s not common to have two different software packages. One loads the LLM into video memory and executes queries on the hardware. That’s the backend. It doesn’t need to have a user interface at all. Ollama or llama.cpp (though I know that llama.cpp also has a minimal frontend) are examples of this.

Then there’s a frontend component. It runs a small Web server that displays a webpage that a Web browser can access, provides some helpful features, and can talk to various backends (e.g. ollama or llama.cpp or some of the cloud-based LLM services). Something like SillyTavern would be an example of this.

Normally the terms are used in the context of Web-based stuff; it’s common for Web services, even outside of LLM stuff, to have a “front end” and a “back end” and to have different people working on those different aspects. If Reins is a native iOS app, I guess it could technically be called a frontend.

But, okay, it sounds like probably the most-reasonable thing to do, if you like the idea of using Reins, is to run Ollama on the Windows machine, expose ollama’s port to the network, and then install Reins on iOS.

So, yeah, probably need to open a port on Windows Firewall (or Windows Defender…not sure what the correct terminology is these days, long out of date on Windows). It sounds like having said firewall active has been the default on Windows for some years. I’m pretty out-of-date on Windows, but I should be able to stumble through this.

While it’s very likely that you aren’t directly exposing your computer to the Internet — that is, nobody from the outside world can connect to an open port on your desktop — it is possible to configure consumer routers to do that. Might be called “putting a machine in the DMZ”, forwarding a port, or forwarding a range of ports. I don’t want to have you open a port on your home computer and have it inadvertently exposed to the Internet as a whole. I’d like to make sure that there’s no port forwarding to your Windows machine from the Internet.

Okay, first step. You probably have a public IP address. I don’t need or want to know that — that’d give some indication to your location. If you go somewhere like https://whatismyipaddress.com/ in a web browser from your computer, then it will show that – don’t post that here.

That IP address is most-likely handed by your ISP to your consumer broadband router.

There will then be a set of “private” IP addresses that your consumer broadband router hands out to all the devices on your WiFi network, like your Windows machine and your phone. These will very probably be 192.168.something.something, though they could also be 172.something.something.something or 10.something.something.something. It’s okay to mention those in comments here — they won’t expose any meaningful information about where you are or your setup. This may be old hat to you, or new, but I’m going to mention it in case you’re not familiar with it; I don’t know what your level of familiarity is.

What you’re going to want is your “private” IP address from the Windows machine. On your Windows machine, if you hit Windows Key-R and then enter “cmd” into the resulting dialog, you should get a command-line prompt. If you type “ipconfig” there, it should have a line listing your private IPv4 address. Probably be something like that “192.168.something.something”. You’re going to want to grab that address. It may also be possible to use the name of your Windows machine to reach it from your phone, if you’ve named it — there’s a network protocol, mDNS, that may let you do that — but I don’t know whether it’s active out-of-box on Windows or not, and would rather confirm that the thing is working via IP before adding more twists to this.

Go ahead and fire up ollama, if you need to start it — I don’t know if, on Windows, it’s installed as a Windows service (once installed, always runs) or as a regular application that you need to launch, but it sounds like you’re already familiar with that bit, so I’ll let you handle that.

Back in the console window that you opened, go ahead and run netstat -a -b -n.

Will look kinda like this:

https://i.sstatic.net/mJali.jpg

That should list all of the programs listening on any ports on the computer. If ollama is up and running on that Windows machine and doing so on the port that I believe it is, then you should have a line that looks like:

TCP     0.0.0.0:11434    0.0.0.0:0    LISTENING

“11434” is the port that I expect ollama to be listening on.

If the address you see before “11434” is 0.0.0.0, then it means that ollama is listening on all addresses, which means that any program that can reach it over the network can talk to it (as long as it can get past Windows Firewall). We’re good, then.

Might also be “127.0.0.1”. In that case, it’ll only be listening to connections originating from the local computer. If that’s the case, then it’ll have to be configured to use 0.0.0.0.

I’m gonna stop here until you’ve confirmed that much. If that all works, and you have ollama already listening on the “0.0.0.0” address, then next step is gonna be to check that the firewall is active on the Windows machine, punch a hole in it, and then confirm that ollama is not accessible from the Internet, as you don’t want people using your hardware to do LLM computation; I’ll try and step-by-step that.