[ale] Overcoming the firewall...

[James CE Johnson]

Hello all,

Here's today's whacky question...

I work for a Big Corporation that has an authenticating firewall installe
and no useful, Linux-friendly VPN solution. When I'm in the office I can
use ssh+corkscrew on my Linux box to connect to my public server at home.
Once there I can ssh on to my development box. Both ssh servers prompt for
password.

When I'm at home I cannot access my office desktop at all. This is where I
need ALE's help.

What I *can* do is use 'ssh -R 2200:localhost:22 myPublicServer' from the
office desktop to connect to my public server and create a socket there
listening on 2200 and forwarding to 22 on the office desktop. Then I drive
home, login to the public box and invoke 'ssh -p 2200' to connect back to
the office box. I don't particularly like this because (a) now 2200 is
open on that public box for anyone (on my public network) to connect to
and (b) I really want access from my development box, not from my public
box.

I've been reading about netcat and I feel like I should be able to use it
or something similar to get things all hooked up but I can't quite figure
it out. From the office I can do 'ssh -t myPublicServer ssh -t
myDevelopmentBox netcat -l 2200' to get an end-to-end connection to my
development box and have a socket listening there on 2200. What I can't
figure out is how to then have the ssh process (on the office box) feed
its stdin/stdout to local port 22.

Surely someone out there has been down a similar road at some point. Any
suggestions will be met with much praise and admiration.

Thanks,
James

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