Comments on: Setting up SSH to work whilst at college.

By: Dion Moult

Dion Moult — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:35:47 +0000

I can change the boot order no problem, but most of them don’t support booting from CDs. I’ve got one 1GB thumb drive but I’m using it so I don’t want to sacrifice it for this.

For those which support CDs I’ve been testing a couple LiveCDs on them (now trying out Suse) and might soon install it on a couple computers that the IT guys don’t really care about.

By: Bix

Bix — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:50:23 +0000

Note the following is a bit complicated…

1) You should be able to setup a full Gentoo build on a 4GB (or higher) thumb drive. I think I saw as much as 64GB as low as ~$100 recently. If your machines are old, I’d use a 486 build — it should work on almost anything.

2) If you cannot control how your target machine boots (i.e. off of a USB thumb drive as opposed to the hard drive), it should be possible to run a qemu session straight off of the thumb drive. If setup properly, you should to be able to access the internet within your qemu session.

Good luck. If you do it right, you should be able to make their network settings worth as much as dirt.

By: thinkMoult - Setting up FreeNX (nxserver-freenx) on Gentoo «

thinkMoult - Setting up FreeNX (nxserver-freenx) on Gentoo « — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:48:38 +0000

[...] in terms of installation procedure FreeNX wins by a mile. But for the moment I’m just happy I won’t be restricted by my school’s web filtering system and glitchy, laggy, virus-filled OS. Perhaps when NeatX [...]

By: Dion Moult

Dion Moult — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:31:37 +0000

Unfortunately they’ve blocked internet settings, and I cannot run Firefox (cannot install, and portable Firefox doesn’t work somehow with their network settings)

By: freya

freya — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:37:41 +0000

To get past any blocking, you could use ssh as a SOCKS proxy. That should probably give you completely unrestricted web access. :-)

By: Dion Moult

Dion Moult — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:06:55 +0000

@Patrick: I installed the Windows NXClient on my Linux box via wine and it just seems to only extract stuff – no registry editing. Hopefully I’ll be able to test it sometime next week. It took some tweaks to get it to run on port 443 instead of 22, but let’s see how it goes!

It’s already looking a great deal faster than VNC though! (Tried VNC several months ago – was slow as hell and didn’t like my compositing at all)

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:26:43 +0000

SSH tunneling FTW. Putty does a good job at it.

If you hate the Windows user interface and don’t want to use it at all, put nxserver-freeedition on your home computer and connect to it with NXClient in fullscreen mode from the Windows box. Oh wait, maybe you need administrative rights to get it installed, not sure about that.
You could also go with TightVNC through the SSH tunnel, but it may be a bit sluggish, even with a good connection.

By: Dion Moult

Dion Moult — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:53:40 +0000

Hessiess: yes, that’s what it is when I make SSH run on port 443. Hence also why I disabled HTTPS in my Apache setup. (See last paragraph of Problem 2)

By: Hessiess

Hessiess — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:32:28 +0000

You could try tunnelling SSH through https, and HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/SVN etc trough the SSH tunnel. HTTPS is encrypted so content filters don’t work(if they did the encryption would be worthless). I don’t know the exact details of how to set this up, but I know its possible.

BTW, one of the reasons why I use SVN for storing everything is that it works over HTTPS, so it can pass through the proxy at the collage I attend currently.