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SSH Reverse Tunnel To Access Box Behind Firewall

jon — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:31:10 +0000

I frequently need to get access to a machine behind a firewall to do some web development, but I don’t have a VPN available. Not a problem – just use a reverse SSH tunnel. By the end of this tutorial, we’ll be able to SSH to the remote server, as well as view any web pages that server has access to.

We’re going to connect to the remote server using our local port 5000 – here’s how.

The 2 boxes we’ll use will be my.home.com (also referred to as localhost) and my.remote.com. We’re assuming you somehow have access to my.remote.com – maybe while at work or through some tool like Citrix. You might want to add monitoring to this to make it stable, but that’s outside the scope of this tutorial. Also, you’ll need direct outside access to your home machine – so you might need to configure your router to do port forwarding.

First, from the remote server, SSH back to yourself.

ssh -R 5000:localhost:22 username@my.home.com

You can now SSH to the remote box through the tunnel by typing

ssh localhost -p 5000

All local traffic that connects to port 5000 is being forwarded via SSH through your reverse tunnel, back to port 22 on the remote machine.

The other half of the problem is viewing web pages of dev boxes behind the firewall – it turns out this is pretty easy once you’ve got the reverse proxy going.
On your home machine type the following:

ssh -D 9999 username@localhost -p 5000
Next, you’ll need to set up a SOCKS proxy. Open your browsers settings and it to the server “localhost” on port 9999. This will forward your traffic back through the tunnel and to the remote server. I do this using FoxyProxy & Firefox, so I can limit the domains that actually route through the proxy.

That’s about it – you should now be able to visit any site that’s in the private network. You now have command line and full browser access.

Helpful references:

howtoforge.com/reverse-ssh-tunneling

embrace ubuntu

CANCEL MY GOOGLE!

jon — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:25:50 +0000

I can’t believe this stuff exists… I love the internet.

hello i am 82 years old and google is on my computer withour permission IT IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. my compoter is slow now and i want to contact the internet what is the number?

Original awesome post

Setting up a remote git repository

jon — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:49:10 +0000

Here’s a great guide for setting up a new remote git repo. Thank you, Tool Man Tim.

Awesome Project: Sparkup

jon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:05:25 +0000

Sparkup is a TextMate and Vim plugin for expanding short CSS style tags into HTML, written by my man Rico Sta Cruz.

From the github page:

You can write HTML in a CSS-like syntax, and have Sparkup handle the expansion to full HTML code. It is meant to help you write long HTML blocks in your text editor by letting you type less characters than needed.

Sparkup is written in Python, and requires Python 2.5 or newer (2.5 is preinstalled in Mac OS X Leopard). Sparkup also offers intregration into common text editors. Support for VIM and TextMate are currently included.

He even included a video demo:

Geek Links

jon — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:25:11 +0000

PHP Quick Profiler

This looks like a pretty cool tool to get a good idea of what’s going on in your PHP script without having to install tools like XDebug and Webgrind / KCacheGrind.

Apple files patent for browser specific volume

I’m not sure how this is anything new, tons of applications have their own volume setting. Quicktime, VLC, Windows Media Player.

Chris DeWolfe bails as MySpace CEO

Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to get out now. It’s essentially just a giant ad for Fox TV shows and movies.

Tivo App Store

Joel Downs believes Tivo should open an app store. I suppose if they are going to continue with their business model, it would make sense, since it probably won’t be long till the Xbox has Tivo functionality. It might already, but I wouldn’t know.

App store hits 1 billion downloads

Speaking of an App store, Apple seems to be doing OK. The sad thing is I still haven’t thought of an interesting app to write.

Enjoy!

4 GB of RAM for Mac Laptop is only $61….

jon — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:39:30 +0000

OK, so I haven’t bought new RAM in years, but still, $61 for 4GB of ram?

Unreal.