Recently, a BUG member asked about using SSH and VNC to remotely control a user’s computer to help them with a computer problem. I wrote a quick explanation of how to do it. Since I took the time, I thought I’d share here too.

Here’s a quick tip for OpenSSH:

Suppose there is an SSH server inside a remote network that does not have its SSH port exposed to the Internet (named “internal.hostname.tld”). If there is an SSH gateway host that you can SSH to (that has the ability to reach “internal”’s SSH port), you can use the netcat (nc(1)) command to Proxy your SSH session to “internal” through “gateway”.

Host internal.hostname.tld internal
  User          merdely
  HostName      internal.hostname.tld
  ProxyCommand  ssh merdely@gateway.hostname.tld nc %h %p 2> /dev/null

Then, make connect to “internal” as if you could directly: ssh internal.hostname.tld

Right now you should take a minute to support the OpenBSD Project.

Chances are, if you’re viewing my website (geek!), you’ve used their work. They’ve developed OpenSSH. This software is included with operating systems from Apple Mac OS X to Redhat Enterprise Linux to Sun Solaris (pretty much all of them but Windows) as well as HP, Cisco and other hardware vendors’ devices. These operating system and hardware companies have been including OpenSSH with their products for years, which saved them the time to develop it on their own.

And that’s just OpenSSH. I’m not even going to get into why OpenBSD deserves your support… that should be self evident through the rest of the content on my site.

Free software is a double edged sword…
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I’ve finally gotten sick of Mailman and Majordomo. I’m only running one mailing list, ssh and both mailing list managers are overkill. Plus, neither of them works in OpenBSD’s Apache chroot, so…

I’ve upgraded my mailing list manager to mlmmj. (more…)

Putty is a free SSH client for Windows.

The Putty project also includes a command line client (plink), an scp client (pscp), an sftp client (psftp) and an ssh-agent application (pageant).