Using remote desktop over an ssh tunnel
This is kinda the nerdy way of remoting a pc on a remote network. Usually a vpn connection would be preffered, but in my case I don’t want to forward the rdp port of security reasons. Lets use my setup as an example: At home I have a server running Debian linux, I also have several windows pc’s that I want to be able to use remote desktop to. Since I have already forwarded the ssh port (22) to my Debian server I figured I could use it as a jumpstation. The way I solved this is somewhat similar to the PuTTY proxy trick guide that I posted earlier. Fire up PuTTY, enter the hostname or ip-adress of your remote network. Then navigate to Connection–>SSH–>Tunnels In the Source port field, type 127.0.0.3:3390 and in the Destination field type the internal ip of the pc you want to remote followed by…
Nifty Debian packages
A little list of some nifty packages for Debian: sudo Oddly enough this isn’t installed by default. Well known for most Linux users, but it enables regular users to perform commands as root without actually logging in as root. molly-guard Protects you from shutting down wrong server when using ssh to a server. What it does is ask you which server you want to shutdown when you run the command shutdown. If you type in wrong hostname it won’t run the command. Handy if you have a bunch of ssh sessions open and you type shutdown in the wrong session. pwgen Generates random passwords. Configurable what kind of passwords you want, for example high complexity and so on. hdparm Can be used to check the performance of harddrives dovecot Widely used imap/pop server postfix Widely used smtp server. Often used in conjunction with dovecot roundcube A package for webmail. Requires…