SSH Tunneling

Last week I managed to configure OpenSSH(1) on my Arch server at home, hostname bluebeetle, to act as a SOCKS(2) tunnel so I could do a little more secure browsing when I'm at school, I used a Bash function(3) to launch the bound proxy in chromium on my laptop, hostname WhiskeyJack. This week I got a profile set up on my W7 box, hostname The-Mage, in PuTTY to connect through the SOCKS tunnel. While I was doing that I had the idea of seeing if I could use the tunnel to not only redirect my HTTP traffic through the tunnel but also if I could use the tunnel to connect low-level to the PostgreSQL server running on bluebeetle. After much tinkering around and a little goggling, plus a couple brain farts, I got the tunnel set up properly and I got the pgsql program I was writing to connect. Hint: it took longer than I care to admit that I should have changed bluebeetle's address in the source code from it's LAN address to 'localhost' since the tunnel was doing the routing not my router.

Boost

After class the other day a question had been raised about network programming, I've used Boost::asio in the past for my own network programming tasks. Boost is a third party library pack, designed for platform independence, that contains libraries for a large majority of common tasks. Boost ASIO is their (A)Synchronous In Out library that contains support for, among other tasks, TCP/UDP programming. In order to implement full duplex(asynchronous) communication you also need to implement threading to allow the reading and writing handles to run on separate threads to prevent them from blocking one another - synchronous communication. Boost provides thread management support in their Boost::thread library.

http://www.boost.org/