{"id":520,"date":"2011-11-02T22:16:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T04:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=520"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:24:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:24:53","slug":"ssh-the-ultimate-firewall-poker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=520","title":{"rendered":"SSH: The ultimate firewall poker"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in a hotel tonight and my internet connection is slow. \u00a0My friend sent me some cool YouTube videos<\/a> that I wanted to check out and I was wondering if the hotel was limiting the bandwidth of YouTube? \u00a0A few days ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how to bypass corporate firewalls where companies block facebook\/gmail\/twitter access. \u00a0The way to check the YouTube problem and to bypass corporate firewalls can be done using the same solution: \u00a0SSH.<\/p>\n

SSH encrypts data in and out of networks. \u00a0It is the ultimate firwall poker. \u00a0If you have SSH capabilities on at least one server on the internet and you can get to it then you can let any traffic in and out of a network. \u00a0Traffic is all encrypted so no sniffers know anything other than the fact that you have a connection from your machine (inside the corporate firewall \/ hotel wireless) on port 22 to some remote server that you have access to outside of the network you are on.<\/p>\n

So here’s a quick test to see if YouTube was being throttled on this network, provided you have a Mac. \u00a0I’m doing this on OSX Lion.<\/p>\n

1. \u00a0SSH to some remote internet server. \u00a0I have one, so I open a port to it:<\/p>\n

ssh -D 2011 vallard@myserver.com<\/pre>\n
This essentially turns your ssh connection into a SOCKS server.<\/p>\n
2. \u00a0Open chrome and navigate to:<\/p>\n
chrome:\/\/settings\/advanced<\/p>\n
From here select ‘Change Proxy Settings’ and your Mac settings will come up. \u00a0Change the Socks settings as shown below:<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
That’s it. \u00a0Now you can visit http:\/\/whatismyip.com and see that the IP address changed. \u00a0You can also go to google maps and it will think you are in the city where the server is getting its network access from.<\/p>\n
So, what about the YouTube video? \u00a0Seemed to be a bit better actually… but was hard to tell. \u00a0 Probably was the same…<\/p>\n
The other cool thing about this is how if you were in an airport then you can skip annoying adds that come on your web browser then this is how you could do it.<\/p>\n
I’ve written in the past about all the cool tunnels you could make with SSH<\/a>. \u00a0 (See Trick 5 and Trick 6)<\/p>\n
The point is: \u00a0There are ways around corporate policies that block you from checking sites you like, and ways to stop service providers from limiting your bandwidth based on the sites you visit. \u00a0Now obviously, you have to trust that the machine you SSH into allows you access to all that. \u00a0But that server is your choice!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m in a hotel tonight and my internet connection is slow. \u00a0My friend sent me some cool YouTube videos that I wanted to check out and I was wondering if the hotel was limiting the bandwidth of YouTube? \u00a0A few days ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how to bypass corporate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[66],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2775,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions\/2775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}