OpenSUSE Linux Rants

So now, we can’t have personal computers on the company network. This “protects against viruses being introduced to the company network,” was the explanation given to me. Nevermind that I am running Linux which isn’t susceptible to them, and certainly doesn’t perpetuate them. So my desktop is on the regular old class C company subnet (192.168.0.x), and my laptop has to be on the wireless network, which is on a completely separate subnet (192.168.1.x). Obviously, there is no way to route traffic between the two computers. So what do you do? Time to whip out the SSH tunnel, again. Only this time, it’s a reverse tunnel.

The idea before is that we are setting up a machine inside the network to forward traffic to a computer outside the network, which then sends it to somewhere else. This time, we are setting up a computer outside the network to forward traffic to a computer inside the network. Then, we just connect to that computer, and the traffic is automatically forwarded in to the other computer.

As in my example, I set up a tunnel between my desktop machine on the 192.168.0.x subnet and my server. I told the server to forward all SSH connections that hit port 10000 to port 22 on the desktop computer. Then, I just SSH in to my server from my laptop, and my request actually ends up at my desktop computer. Because I’m using KDE and fish://, it’s essentially just like browsing a network fileshare on a local subnet, because Linux can do stuff like that.

Sounds exciting, and indeed it is. If you’d like to read the tutorial I used to set this all up, head on over here. Fun stuff, baby.