#ops stuff

[allcaplock]

also heres an update on The Felix Corner tm

[hackily]

Setting up Secure Browsing from a Coffee Shop

I've already posted about using a ssh tunnel in order to pair with my coworkers while working remotely. Yesterday I decided to spend a little bit of time extending that system to also allow me to use a SOCKS proxy, so that I can browse securely even when working from a strange network.

How does that work? In a nutshell, I will create a secure connection to a trusted remote server, and then send all of my traffic through that server, which will act as a proxy. In this case I will use my personal web server that is hosted by Dreamhost as the secure proxy.

This is a feature that ssh supports out of the box. The following section in my ssh config file is responsible for setting up the proxy:

Host webproxy HostName example.host.com User my-username DynamicForward 8888 Compression yes RequestTTY force

The "DynamicForward" directive sets up a tunnel on localhost:8888.

I'm running Mac OS X Mountain Lion, so using the proxy is simple. Under "Network" I added a location called "Out," and under advanced settings for Proxy, specified a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888:

So at this point switching to secure network access is as simple as running "ssh webproxy" and setting my Location to "Out" in the Apple menu.

Which is good. Now if I'm working on a public network and I want to do something like, say, book a flight, I can do so with a reasonable sense of security.