In the never ending quest to find more ways to connect machines securely. I’ve discovered SSH tunneling. It’s rather old school, but yet extremely useful. The two posts from Lifehacker that made it supremely easy were the server with Cygwin post, and this post explaining how to use that tunnel as a web proxy.
Now the big question … why would you need this? If you’re at a public hotspot, it can make everything you do encrypted without the need for tons of extra software, and if you’re stuck behind a proxy, this will allow you to access sites you may need but could normally not access. Moving files with SFTP is also far more stable than other methods, and the connection seems to hold quite well.
Just another handy tip in case you find the need for it!
One Response to Web Browsing? Do you Tunnel?
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I used to SSH Tunnel many years back when I ran my own servers. I can remember being in Spain running a training course at HP when the wife called me and told me that there was a problem sending e-mail. Turns out someone had found an open flaw in the firewall that I was using (others had the same flaw), and they’d turned the server into a spam zombie. I tunneled in, fixed the firewall then contacted the ISP who had dropped all SMTP service from our IP. After taking 30 mins to get someone competent on the phone, I explained it was fixed, had them try to send through the server, and when they couldn’t they allowed SMTP on port 25 again.
The most annoying thing was they didn’t block SMTP traffic, just port 25. I enabled SMTP on a different port during the interim and it worked just fine. *shakes head*