Tunneling AIM over SSH = possible!!

[jro]

If anyone remembers I asked this question earlier, if there was a way I could tunnel AIM or any other instant messenger through SSH. For the longest time, I couldn't get it to work and I thought it was just impossible. OSCAR just had too many problems running through proxies, since it is ususally blocked. But, after much trying, I got it to work. Here is what I did.

The only outgoing port that was open was 80, for HTTP requests. I think there was a certain amount of protocol filter going on behind the scenese too, but I am uncertain since the network admin is anal about his servers. I knew from experience that OSCAR didn't work well with public http proxy servers and no one I could find would offer a public SOCKS server. Alright, theres the problem, here is the solution.

First I set up my SSHd server to run over port 80. I could now connect to my home machine via ssh, this was after some sweet talking of the network admin to not filter it out. Then I set up a private (read: heavily locked down) SOCKS proxy server (dante) on my machine at home. OpenSSH provides a nice mechanism for ''tunneling' a protocol encrypted through SSH. First I set up dante to only respond to requests on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1) on port 1080, everything else it just drops. Then I set up a localforward on my trusty SSH client (putty) like so:
L1080 localhost:1080
I fired up my favorite IM client, GAIM, changed the network settings to use a SOCKS5 proxy running on localhost on port 1080 and crossed my fingers. A second later, I was connected on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber! It worked better than I could have hoped!

I can provide my config file for dante if anyone wants to see how I set it up.

[di||itante]

That is cool.

And, it is why I love Linux.

Anything is possible.

Mike

nice.


Good job. You should write up an exact how to on this!