Phinfinity | Tech, Code, Algorithms

Update: Part 2 for https posted in separate post! So for a very long now I’ve had a nagging issue with proxies. My primary source of internet is through my college HTTP Proxy and this adds a couple of issues whenever I am dealing with applications that don’t have proxy support coded in them. I have this issue often both on my laptop as well as on my android tablet (Youtube streaming!). Its a very distressing situation and I’ve always wanted to set-up a transparent proxy solution which could re-direct the traffic out of such applications to a sort of secondary proxy server which can interpret the requests and forward them to my college proxy server. Recently I managed to get this working! The main tool used for this was iptables. For those of you who haven’t heard of iptables at a glance it is a flexible firewall which is now part of the Linux kernel by default. But iptables is actually much more powerful and flexible than just a simple firewall to block ports. iptables ...

Lately I was tired of having to repeatedly type my user name for my ssh connections. In my current setup I often ssh to two servers inside the IIIT (my college) network. merely typing ssh web.iiit.ac.in would try to use the username as my local computer’s login user name. So I was trying to get a workaround for this. A simple approach would be to rename my local computer’s user name to the IIIT server user name , but now that would be very lame. So I figured there must be some simple configuration available and looked up man ssh_config which gave an extremely detailed list of all the possible configuration options. Finally my configuration file looked like this : Host *.iiit.ac.in mirage web User iiit_login_user Host * ControlMaster auto ControlPath /home/phinfinity/.ssh/%r@%h:%p GSSAPIAuthentication no The first line specifies the categories for which the configuration below are to be used. Here I have specified the configuration to be applied for 3 possible categories “*.ii...