Thank you Slashdot, for letting me know that AOL changed the TOS for AIM. And that they can read and use anything from your conversations. I need to change, methinks. At least I’m not using fully AIM software, which seems to change it. Adium is my poison. But are any of our friends interested in changing to Jabber with me?
Say you want to talk to your wife or remote co-worker on AIM, but you’re on a system inside a firewall. All is not lost if the firewall is really picky about what ports it’ll allow you to use—and you have no ability to change the firewall’s settings. If the SSH port (22) is open on the firewall, you’ve got a workaround as long as you can SSH to a remote host that’s able to be configured for you or by you.
In the description of what I came up with (derived from the suggestions of others via google), both the home system and laptop I describe are running version 9.2 of the SuSE Linux distribution. In theory, however, this should work with any client using a recent copy of OpenSSH. Please feel free to correct me if this isn’t true. 🙂
Originally, I suggested that you need to install dante and dante-server on the remote server you’ll be using to do the work of the connection. However, it turns out OpenSSH has the DynamicForward option which does the work for you, making the OpenSSH server and client use the SOCKS5 protocol to handle the connection. Many thanks to Justin Mason for pointing it out.
On the laptop that’s roaming from place to place, install just the GAIM instant messaging package. (In theory, if we had to use dante-server then you’d also install the dante client on the laptop so KDE can use the SOCKS for its own IM client kopete. However, we’re using GAIM because I’ve been unable to make KDE+kopete work for me in this. And since OpenSSH is doing the work, we don’t need to install the extra package on the laptop.)
From inside the firewall, log into the remote system with the command “ssh home“. The ~/.ssh/config file (or wherever your SSH client keeps its configuration) should have
Host home
HostName 1.2.3.4 # server external IP address
# If we were using dante and dante-server, we'd need:
#LocalForward 1080 127.0.0.1:1080
# However, we can just use this:
DynamicForward 1080
On the laptop, run GAIM and go into Preferences, selecting Network. Under ProxyServer choose Proxy type SOCKS5, and set Host to 127.0.0.1 and Port to 1080. Click on Close.
To connect, click “Sign On” in the GAIM window. (You’ll need to make sure that each account in GAIM has “Auto-login” selected so more than just AIM are used.)
In theory, the SSH tunnel letting you use SOCKS should now make any/all of your AIM, MSN, and YahooMessenger IDs be online successfully. I’ll be interested to hear of any problems others might have trying to get this to work.
I was searching for something or other I can’t remember and I found maps.google.com. Though I think it’s only good for US sites so far, and still has some bugs, it’s still really cool.
We’re on a holiday trip with some family members, and the place we’re staying lets you use the Net via a cable modem. So ever in pursuit of a hack, I got a linksys wireless router and hooked it up so we could all share the connection wirelessly. As an experiment, I left it unencrypted (we’re not billed for bandwidth) to see how many people would discover it and want to partake.
Up until today, it’s been a non-issue. But since this morning, we found the bandwidth slow to a crawl. None of us were doing any big transfers. (And this nearly 4Mbit link can get an awful lot before you start to feel it.) So I looked at the DHCP logs, and saw two IP addresses that were out of the range being assigned automatically. Hmmm. Turns out those two addresses were doing, together, long unending transfers. For hours on end. Sigh.
So much for that; up went the WEP (no WPA yet), and down went my hopes that people would enjoy the freeness of it but not abuse it. I know WEP won’t stop them if they’re really trying, but I expect there are easier targets now. Some jerk or jerks ate it up. Oh well, maybe I’ll try this experiment again sometime.
So. B’s in San Fran. And I’m home with P. And…the DSL box dies. A quick, sudden death. No lights, not even power. Can you say PANIC?! I mean, what am I supposed to do with NO INTERNET?!
Talking to B, it turns out that Declan, our friend up the road, has his brother-in-law’s old dsl box. I RUN up the road. Plug it in. And start geeking. Man, this is frustrating. It took a day and a half, 4 phone calls to Eircom (“We’ve never had that DSL box model…are you sure that’s the right model?” Yes, I’m sure, and we’ve had it for 3 freaking years, and you got it for us!!) Finally got Eamonn’s box working, and I have access. And at the same time, eircom (fondly called eircon by most of the net community in Ireland) finally realized that they were supposed to replace our dsl box a while ago with a Netopia. So that’s in the post now (supposedly…). Using the word supposedly is a requirement when speaking about eircom.
So I’m back up. 77 messages waiting for me. And I still don’t have all the normal features that I did with the other box. But I just have to wait for B to get back and finish the full install of the box.
If I can just get eircom out here to fix their shoddy wiring where the dsl comes into the house, then we’ll be all set. Oh, don’t hold your breath….
Here, where I work, two Japanese gentleman are visiting to learn about one of the projects I’m on. I think I impressed them as yesterday I was given a script to demo for them a few hours before the demo. I did my best to test it in an artificial environment, but when the real demo came around in the correct environment it did not work well. The demo turned into a shell script debugging lesson, but in the end all worked out.
A little while ago, today, they asked me a Windows question. How to copy a file from the Debian system to there Windows laptop. As they where using PuTTY as a terminal I just got pscp.exe. I launced a DOS prompt and then looked at the keyboard. It was Japanese, giving up on stumbling through the Japanese directory name I had to relinquish the keyboard and dictate. Again, all went well, but the language barrier was there the entire time.
Maybe I should of just gotten FileZilla instead.
Although it was in April 2004, if you haven’t yet read the story “I fought the scammer… and I won.” it’s worth your time. A sysadmin at a Dublin Internet cafe snags a spammer with their laptop still hooked up.
Just discovered pocket-lint.co.uk in the UK, similar in idea to what you get at ThinkGeek in the US. Tons of stuff. Try not to think about the current exchange rate for the US $ or the Euro €.
My father, 余艾蕾 and I have finished remodelling Rerun’s (aka zen.org‘s) room. First my father came in and put in a Pergo® floor. Second, 余艾蕾 and I repainted and put the molding back in. Then 余艾蕾 reorered the furniture a little.
The entire time Rerun was sitting in the middle of the room, all alone. I funally put my desktop back together. I would put up a picture, but the batteries to my digital camera are dead and some time in all the moving the recharger went missing. Sigh.
Driven by seeing our friend David, a visitor from the US, use IMAP to do his work mail, I finally decided to follow through with an idea I had a while ago. Instead of syncing my mail directory between my desktop and my laptop, which meant I had to avoid using one without knowing I’d sync’d from the other (a strange sort of handshake), I can instead leave the folders on the desktop. I’ll use the Courier IMAP server.
My choice is driven by my use of kmail for the last few years, which has resulted in most of my mail folders being in maildir format. Which in theory should be made available by the Courier server, since it (and only it, from what I can tell) fully supports maildir folders. The catch, of course, is that kmail has its own idea about how to keep things in folders and sub-folders. I ended up having to finally write my own shell script to turn an existing kmail tree into one that Courier likes to use.
So I did the script, creating a new Maildir tree with the script that copies stuff properly out of ~/mail. And now I can not only make kmail use that, but also finally play with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client. Of course in setting it up, I discovered that I could also use Thunderbird as a Usenet news reader instead of pan, and also as an RSS feed aggregator instead of Liferea. I don’t yet know how well it’ll behave for these other services, but so far the common interface looks promising.
The only worry I have is my intent to ssh into my desktop system from outside, and use that tunnel for access to the IMAP server. (And, I guess, also our news server.) I still have to get a universal power supply for my desktop system so it’ll stay up if the power hiccups and we’re not home. But it’s seeming like it’d be cool to not worry about every single thing being on my laptop. 🙂
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