Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

I use SSH a lot. I use it for secure surfing at coffee shops (SSH secure browsing) This keeps people from watching / sniffing what I am doing on public wifi. I also use it to keep in contact with people (IRC) and access to files at home.

In some locations I am unable to get an SSH (port 22) connection out of a firewall. In these instances, I use ajaxterm . It is a web based terminal window.

I recently updated my linux box and had to re-install this wonderful tool. I followed the quick install (sudo apt-get install ajaxterm). After the quick install the app worked but did not run as I liked it. I wanted to run this under https.
I followed the guided install at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AjaxTerm.

However I will add these instructions to complete the install. If you have not used ssl on your machine and follow the instructions above you may get “Invalid command ‘SSLEngine’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server “.

This is due to not having run “sudo a2enmod ssl” which adds the ssl module to apache.
I then ran into : “SSLCertificateFile: file ‘/etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem’ does not exist”
To correct this issue I had to generate the default certificate for the machine.

Code:
sudo apt-get install ssl-cert
sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
sudo make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

After these simple steps, I am up and running on Ajaxterm over ssl. So I can quickly connect to my home machine from any web browser.

I love SSH I’m not sure if there is a better tool out there. It can be used so many ways. I have often been at client locations and been unable to access servers or sites I need to support or do work on. Corporations often block sites that I support and need access to so use my home SSH server to be a proxy to connect. I use this same technique when I am in a coffee shop or unsecured wireless and want to browse securely. To use SSH as a proxy you just need to turn on Tunnels.

You can do this through the command line
$ssh -D 1234 yourusername@yoursshserver.com
or through PUTTY
In putty you just need to open up the tunnels area under ssh and add the PORT you want to use (example: 1234) and then select the Dynamic Destination (AKA the internet)

To use the tunnel (SOCKS) you just need to change your internet connection settings in your browser. Firefox: Tools | Options | Advanced | Network | connection Settings.

This is a great way to keep your browsing secure.