January 19, 2009
I have an HP printer with a JetDirect card that has no setting for using alternate SMTP ports, or SMTP auth. It's plain-vanilla SMTP via port 25, end of story. Comcast, helpfully, has started blocking port 25, and trying to explain why that's a problem for me to their tech support is getting me nowhere (they keep asking irrelevant questions about my desktop email software).
I'm looking at an SSH tunnel out to my mail server as the solution. My problem is that Meerkat doesn't seem to allow creation of a tunnel on a port < 1024, and again, the printer has no way to talk to anything other than port 25. Is this a limitation of Meerkat, or of the system (I've found references via Google to creating tunnels on various *nix systems to solve exactly this problem, which makes me think it might be the former)?
(1 vote)
January 21, 2009
#1
SSH tunnels are capable of
SSH tunnels are capable of targeting local ports below 1024, but on UNIX systems (Mac OS X included), it requires root permission. So, in Meerkat's case, it would require you to type in your password and for you to be an administrator on your Mac.
I have this as a todo on a later version of Meerkat, but did not put it into 1.0 as it complicates the automatic reconnection of tunnels. Even if you had already authorized the tunnel, upon sleeping and then waking your Mac, a new SSH process needs to be started and this would need authorization, too.
In effect, everything about the operation for ports under 1024 is the same, but the SSH process needs to start as root and remain running as root. So that is the reason for the lack of the feature right now.
The only things I can recommend are one of three suggestions (none in Meerkat directly):
1. Try to see if you can reconfigure the card somehow (I imagine you've tried this).
2. Look into running a port 25 relay on a Mac on the LAN to forward the mail from.
3. Configure a Meerkat tunnel with a port over 1024 (such as 2525), activate it, and use ps ax | grep ssh in Terminal to see the process generated and run it manually in Terminal, but with port 25 instead. It will involve changing the port number on one side of the -L argument.
Hope that helps. Stay tuned, as I do hope to have this in a future version.
March 8, 2010
#3
Thanks for the nudge, Hendel.
Thanks for the nudge, Hendel. This is still on the radar and will probably go into the next major version.
August 11, 2010
#4
Second Nudge
This is an important one for me; I have an AS/400 JDBC driver that I'm tunnelling by hand, and I can't easily change the port the JDBC driver uses, so if Meerkat were to support <1000 port tunnels, I would be able to use it.
It's really not that hard for me to run a script, but Meerkat has some nice features, I did want to at least try it.
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Just checking back in on this after downloading the 1.5.1 update. I have a Terminal command that does what I need, just keep hoping that I'll be able to turn the job of bringing and keeping the tunnel up over to Meerkat. Every once in a while I get a call from the wife that she can't scan to email, and I have to remote in to manually issue the command. Nudge, nudge. :-)