The sys admin's daily grind — Corkscrew

Dork Holiday

Article from Issue 166/2014
Author(s):

Sys admin columnist Charly never takes a vacation from the Internet. A beach bar with WiFi is quickly found, but it runs a forced proxy, which thinks that the SSH port (22) is in league with the devil and blocks the connection. Time to drill a tunnel.

The right tool for tunneling SSH through a proxy like Squid, Gauntlet, CacheFlow, Junkbuster, or Apache mod_proxy is Corkscrew. Why? Because the name corkscrew is well chosen, and because the program author introduces himself like this: "My name is Pat Padgett. I'm a dork." In my experience, such laconic people are great programmers.

Most distros have a Corkscrew in a back drawer somewhere; if not, you can pick it up online [1]. The SSH daemon should be running on port 443 on the target server, because many proxies refuse to connect to port 22. Incidentally, binding the SSH daemon to two or more ports simultaneously is not a problem. To do this, you just add another port line to your sshd_config:

[...]
Port 22
Port 443

[...]

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