Re: sftp sources?

[Cristian Gutierrez <crgutier@dcc.uchile.cl>]

Sam Halliday wrote:

[ftp/http is bandwidth limited on university network, ssh isn't limited]

[idea: tunnel ftp/http via ssh and a remote friendly proxy]

>interesting,
>
>ok, i think this could work, ill try to set it up for them on my
>machine to see, for now. anyone got any hints where i can read up about
>setting this kind of thing up? i've never done anything like this
>before, nor have i ever heard of it!

Here are some good resources:

http://www.rzg.mpg.de/networking/tunnelling.html
http://www.afp548.com/Articles/security/ssh-tunnels.html

But i'll try to explain what's on my mind:

Once you have a proxy working on your machine (say, squid on port 8000),
and an account made for your pals to ssh-in, you tell your them to do
something like this:

$ ssh -L 8000:localhost:8000 -fNC yourpalsaccount@yourmachine.isp.tld

(you can read ssh's manpage to understand all the options here)
And they should have lines like these in their /etc/apt/apt.conf:

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://localhost:8000";;
Acquire::ftp::Proxy "http://localhost:8000";;

Of course, if the connection goes down for whatever motive, they'll
have to re-establish the tunnel. There are some tools to automate this
(autossh for example), but then you'll need some public-key
authentication going on to avoid entering the password every time.

HTH,

-- 
Cristian Gutierrez			http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~crgutier
crgutier[@]dcc.uchile.cl                        Jabber:crgutier@jabber.org

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