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SSH tunnels for the common man (and woman)

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Thanks to the fine folks at TUAW, I've been alerted to an interesting start to a series at Apple Matters called Using SSH: Secure Tunnels for the Common Man. There's a nice bit of explanation on the need for and the basic concepts behind SSH tunneling.

Of course I'd be remiss to not mention Meerkat, Code Sorcery Workshop's next application, built specifically to address the need for easy and feature-rich management of SSH tunnels. Even for folks like me who know the Terminal commands for SSH and the concepts behind rather arcane uses such as dynamic forwarding as a SOCKS proxy, it's very useful to have menu bar access, Growl integration, Bonjour capability, and other Mac-like features for a classic UNIX tool like SSH.

However, I think that even with a tool like Meerkat, it's important to have some sort of forum or knowledge base for various uses of SSH, which is something that I hope to start when Meerkat launches. It's tricky because part of an SSH tunnel is inherently personal (e.g., your account details), but the basic concept can be shared for other people -- whether it's tunneling to your home iTunes collection, accessing your colocated Mac server securely via screen sharing, or securely browsing the web while on guest networks.

Anyway, give the article a look. I look forward to the upcoming installments -- SSH is a dark art to many and it's good to shed some light on it!

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I'm really excited about Meerkat and I can't wait to see it released. Also the poster is cool, i thought it looked familiar, since I'm a CS student at the University of Maryland which is where its from.
PS, I love your blog, its interesting to hear the trials of developing on mac.

@Mark: Thanks for the comment :-) I've seen the poster around for a couple years, but only when searching for it today did I find the version with the UMD info at the bottom. Are you in College Park? I used to live in DC and College Park is a fun place... I love the Potbelly there and Franklin's down the street a ways...

zomg i love the graphic

Yeah, I'm a student at College Park and I've lived in the area for a while. I love franklin's (I've been going there forever) and Potbelly is great too, though I'm more of a Chipotle person myself. I didn't notice the text on the poster at first, but it looked familiar. Then when I showed my friend your page his immediate response was "he's got an image from cs.umd.edu". (Though, the poster is a bit old, I don't think any of the CS systems still accept telnet or rsh and the page it refers you to was last updated in 2001...)

Hi,
I am the friend that Mark mentioned. You lookin' for beta testers? I have a house in Silver Spring I need an easy tunnel to.

@Rayhan: Thanks, but I think I'm all set now.