Archive for October, 2008

MyEnTunnel – An SSH Tunnel Manager For Windows

I use SSH all the time for general admin work, and for most things, PuTTY (or Plink, if I don’t need to bother with a terminal) gets the job done with no muss and no fuss. But recently, I needed a solution to replace a VPN from our colo to our HQ, and decided I could get the job done with an SSH tunnel. However, since the tunnel needs to be up 24/7, just using PuTTY or Plink wouldn’t do the trick. That’s where MyEnTunnel comes in. MyEnTunnel is a wrapper for Plink that monitors the SSH connection and reestablishes it when it times out. It’s written in Delphi by someone who refers to himself as “Nemesis][” and describes himself as “old soul in this world of techno babble“. The product works well, is easy to understand and set up, and actually outdoes PuTTY’s own interface for managing tunnels. The only downside is that it doesn’t run as a service, but my particular needs were on a box that is already running logged-in 24/7 anyway, so that didn’t matter to me. If you need a high-quality easy to use SSH Tunnel Manager, definitely take a look at MyEnTunnel.

Random Thought, or How Long I’ve Been in IT

I’ve been piddling around with the Intrepid Ibex beta on an Acer Aspire 5735 laptop that I picked up from Best Buy for a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got VirtualBox installed, and I’m running OpenSolaris, AsteriskNOW!, and Slax 6.0.7 simultaneously in virtual machines. I was setting up NAT port forwarding so that I could use certain services on the virtual hosts from my MacBook Pro over the wireless LAN when it hit me that for my first “real” job in IT about twelve years ago, I was a sysadmin in charge of (among other things) a couple of SPARCstations and a Nortel Meridian phone switch. Those boxes cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars when they were purchased way back when (although they were getting a bit long in the tooth by the time they got to me), and now I am able to set up essentially the same services in a completely virtualized environment on a computer that cost less that $400. In fact, if I wanted to, I could use a service like EC2 and skip the hardware altogether. It’s scary what you can do with very little money from a technology standpoint these days.

Sad, Yet Not Totally Unexpected

New Rule: You must be at least this tall to fire the submachine gun.

Completely Random Thought

The only reason to wish for a McCain victory in November is to see more of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.