Friday, October 20, 2006

Use ssh for http ftp and so on

My ISP has a little fault that I use to my advantage. The software that they use works kinda in the following way:
Before I login to their network all my external connections are blocked. I can not do http, ftp, ssh or anything else related to external network. This is usual isn't it.
Now I login to my ISP using my username and password and i am connected!!! I have http, ftp, ssh and anything else that I can expect normally. This again is all usual.
Now starts the unusual part: Lets assume I have my browser open and a normal download is going on in Firefox. Also assume I have ssh and sftp running. Now I log out of my network. Usually what you should expect is that all my connections stop. But here is where my ISP software is a good one for me. All connections on port 80 are blocked as soon as I logout; but no other connection ( on ports other than 80 ) that was open when I was logged in, is blocked. So ssh and sftp remain working. Similarly if i had torrent running it would continue to run. I never really made a test as to which ports are blocked and which are not, but at least I know many ports are not blocked. Now the even more shocking part. My connection comes with unlimited data transfer, but is very limited in speed : 64 kbps. What happens after I logout is that the connections that were running ( non port 80 ones ) take as much bandwidth as available on the network!!!
All I had to do was to somehow redirect all of my usual port 80 connections to some other port so that I could surf at a better speed or download the 2 Debian DVDs :) So I did some Google-ing for a solution. Somehow I thought that I could open an ssh to an external server I have and redirect all http, ftp through it. So this is what I got :
use this command> ssh -qTfnN2 -D 8080 user@server
This basically will connect to a server and open a local port 8080 so that now I could setup SOCKS proxy in Firefox through localhost:8080... and it works!!!
Also I can download stuff using Curl through the above proxy too:
use this command> curl http://url/to/file --socks5 localhost:8080
And that works too. Hope this helps you too :)

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Share our web hosting server

Recently me and some friends changed from our web hosts to a full dedicated server. We took a nice server from Layered Technologies (http://www.layeredtech.com/) and put in Xen in it. Now each of us are running their own OS on the Xen. We had thought of dividing the server 4-way, but we are only using 2 slots. So if anyone is interested in taking a piece do tell us. We are mostly available on IRC : Freenode : Lookout for the following nicks :
brainless, llyric. Thats the two of us.
Even if you want to take a dedicated server and share it you can contact us if you need any help.
The details of the server are:
Processor : AMD 64 Athlon 4000+
Memory : 2048MB RAM
Hard Drive Space : 500GB Hard Drive
Drive Controller : SATA
Operating System : Fedora Core 5
IP Addresses : 8 (5 Usable)
Bandwidth : 1500GB
Up-link Port Speed : 100Mbps Up-link
All resources are equally divided and shared among the slots except the bandwidth, which is available to all and any slot can use all available bandwidth. Terms are simple: We don't want any illegal content like file. Usage of resources should not be such that it causes a pain to maintain the server. You must have basic knowledge to maintain your own slot. You will be given access to the main server too in case you need to restart or re configure your slot etc. We just want trust able and self supporting folks who can take care of there own OS. You can have any legal content including adult content.
As you can understand this is a good server and we do not utilize even 5% of the server resources on average, so you can make good use of the machine.
Each slot is at around less than $40 and if you want you can have 2 slots together in one with double the resources of one slot allocated to you.