Friday, September 25, 2009

Use "dislocate" to created a re-connectable process

Use: dislocate

Eventually, use ^] to disconnect. Later on, reconnect to the Linux server, run "dislocate" w/o parameters, and choose the session to reconnect to. Much easier than "screen" for simple situations!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Upgrade Fedora 9 to Fedora 10

I know... 11 is already out, but I didn't feel like messing with it. Now that 9 is no longer supported, I figured I'd take the plunge.

I got some error about missing dependencies for:

avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386

yum remove avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386


said it erased it, but it was still there.... rpm -e gave an error about the script returning an error...

Eventually, this worked:

rpm -e --noscripts avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386


Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Breaking through a restrictive proxy

I have sshd running on a small linux box at home. This allows me to access my home network from anywhere, except from work... The proxy wouldn't let me through. I tried proxytunnel, putty, and a few other toys, but none seemed to work. Then I found httptunnel :)

On my linux box, I created a new service with the following command:

/usr/bin/hts -p /var/opt/hts/PID -F localhost:22 81

That starts the httptunnel server with:
-p to write the PID to the file /var/opt/hts/PID
-F to forward to port 22 on the local host
and finally it is listening on port 81


Next, on my Windows machine, I downloaded the httptunnel package for cygwin. From a cygwin terminal, I could then execute:

htc -P : -A -F 8888 :81

Where:
-P is the proxy address:port
-A is my username:password for the proxy
-F is the port to use on the local machine
followed by my server:port

Once htc is running on my machine, I can do:

ssh -p 8888 -l localhost

Like magic, htc wraps everything inside some http "stuff", hands it off to the proxy, which passes it to my home machine. hts on my Linux box gets rid of the http garbage and passes the packet on to sshd (and visa-versa).

Very nice indeed! Now I can use ssh to tunnel all kinds of apps, like remote desktop, or even firefox.

As a side note, here's how to use my isp for browsing:

ssh -p -l -D localhost:8889 localhost

In Firefox:
Edit --> Preferences
Advanced Tab
Settings
Select "Manual Proxy Configuration", enter "localhost" in the SOCKS host field and port 8889.

Woo Hoo!