I’ve got a headless box at home, which is my endpoint for the office
VPN. Being headless, of course, means that to do any work, I have to
SSH in from the laptop.
This sucks for doing things on the laptop, my workflow gets studded
with ssh calls, and the office jabber server is inaccessible.
So the way around this is to set up a SSH tunnel from the laptop,
through the endpoint, to a machine in the office, and use that to
connect to the jabber server, and allow direct checkouts from the
repository.
In the SSH config ~/.ssh/config:
Host workstation
User jaq
ProxyCommand nohup ssh endpoint nc -w1 %h %p
workstation is my box in the office, that I’m planning on SSHing
directly to. endpoint is the box next to me, that I can actually
ssh to.
Log into endpoint, and add entries to /etc/hosts for the actual IP
of workstation, just in case it can’t look it up.
10.x.x.x workstation
Now, if you ssh workstation from the laptop, it should “just work”;
ssh to endpoint and then magically go through the VPN to
workstation. (Assuming, of course, that you can ssh from endpoint
to workstation – debugging your VPN is out of scope for this post
:)
Ok, so that’s working, we can set up an SSH tunnel so that jabber will
work:
% ssh -fN -l jaq -L 5222:jabber:5222 workstation
So, as long as workstation can resolve jabber, this will set up a
tunnel from port 5222 locally, to port 5222 on jabber.
Edit /etc/hosts on the laptop and add the entry for jabber:
127.0.0.1 jabber
Now, you can connect using gaim to jabber, just as you would if the
laptop was in the office, and it’ll magically just work.
To get access to the code repository, just follow the first steps that
get you SSHing directly to it (assuming that you use SSH as a
transport to the repository).
Now that you appear to be working, time to play some video games.