If you are working on your friends receiver then i would recommend using Teamviewer.
Its brilliant for remote access because it gives you full control over his pc but he can see everything that you are doing..
just downloaded it and will try it later, hes home from work now and is watching tv so cant be messing around till later on.
Ten below, i'm in my house working thru the web interface and i already have that port forwarded on his router so i dont think i'm on a local network (as i understand you mean local network with his receiver and my laptop connected directly through the same router. i'm not a hundred percent up on all this setup but i'm getting there)
