Random Wisdom

I guess it’s usual for every institution to have a central firewall/proxy that all internal traffic must go through to reach the outside world. I am by no means paranoid about security/privacy but it got me thinking.

… And once again, SSH to the rescue! It almost feels like the possibilites of a SSH tunnel with Local port forwarding are limitless 😀

I just picked up a public German proxy from this page:

http://www.publicproxyservers.com/index.html

And then setup a SSH connection to forward local port 8080 to proxy:port. Then for the browser I just set localhost:8080 as the proxy.

Well, the speed is a little short of astounding but it’s very much usable 😀 Now all that the central firewall/proxy should be seeing is a bunch of encrypted traffic.

The Cisco VPN client doesn’t seem to compile on the 64bit architecture. Well, open source to the rescue .. behold VPNC. Since the Cisco profile files are no good, I needed to decrypt the group password – which was a piece of cake thanks to the password decryptor on the site. They say it’s done through the command:

# ltrace -i ./vpnclient connect ... 2>&1 | fgrep 805ac57

I’ll try it for myself sometime.