Getting through firewalls with ping

The gauntlet was thrown. The lodgenet network at the riviera was blocking everything unless you pay.

Things we tried:

• DNS tunnels
• Listening outside on externalhost:1111
• PingTunnel FTW!!!!

Once I verified that ICMP pings were making it all the way out and back from the public internet I started looking for a ping tunnel.

Enter PingTunnel (http://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel/)

I downloaded and installed PingTunnel on my laptop and on my linode.

On the linode:
ptunnel -x [password]

On my laptop:
ptunnel -x [password] -p -lp 8001 -da 127.0.0.1 -dp 22

This tunnels localhost:8001 to my linode:22

I finish by creating a socks proxy using ssh dynamic port forwarding:
ssh [user]@localhost -p 8001 -D 1080

Once I log into my server I configure firefox to use localhost:1080 as a socks proxy.

After these steps I'm using lodgenet internet without getting caught by the gateway.

Huzzah!

PS. If you don't think it will work, I'm posting this through the tunnel.

Update:
Connections can be problematic. You must allow all ICMP on input. The following iptables rules work for me:

iptables -F
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

The icmp rule is the one I changed that got it working.

Programming projects

I've started playing with Erlang again. I know what you're thinking... "What? Shaun doing something in erlang? Well, I never." There has been that small matter of some people asking me if I would use Erlang any time I present an interesting problem. My normal answer is No, that's not what it's for.

I've been thinking of picking up my DNS proxy code as well as writing a syslog receiver. Look at me reinvent the wheel, with clustering and supervision trees!

We'll see what I find time to get done. There is still that small matter of my day job and having a life at night.

Finals

The semester is almost over. All I can say is that calculus is awesome. I have my final on Wednesday, I expect it's going to be fun.

In other news I'm having alot of fun with programming. I added CS 1400 Fundamentals of programming to my spring semester schedule. Yesterday I managed to execute an erlang module written and compiled on my linux box on my omniFlash. Pretty soon here I'll have Yaws and ErlyWeb running. Not too bad for a 200MHz arm with 32MB ram.

I'm pretty sure that the CS 1400 class is going to be kind of a walk. I'll be excited to see how it all works out.

More fun with the hobie

Last week I went sailing up at bear lake. Today, I went sailing with my brother. I think the first lesson I learned today is that I need to get up earlier. If I get to the lake and the wind is already blowing pretty well, I've wasted that good sailing time.

Another lesson I learned is to make sure I secure the tiller extension arm before travel. The extension arm that makes it so you don't have to be sitting on the back edge of the boat the whole time in order to steer. The extension arm also costs $80, so if you drive out of the bear lake marina without securing it that's what the replacement is going to cost you.

I'm pretty sure it's a mistake that only has to be made once.

Other than that I've used silicone to cover the cracks in the starboard transom that were leaking so I should be good at least until the end of the season.

I bought some spare parts at my local Hobie dealer. I picked up some shackles lest I lose one while rigging the boat. I also got a new wind indicator. Apparently the flag decided to fall of of my old one between where I stepped the mast and where I put the boat in the water. Go figure.

I'm not sure how much this boat will end up costing me, but I'm pretty sure it will be worth it.

The adventures of Baron Munchausen

I'm watching this film right now. One of my favorite lines is from Baron Munchausen when speaking of the turks:

"They are inviting us to defeat them... We must ablige them!"

DDR Again

Today I played DDR for the first time in months. A friend of mine wanted to get StepMania and was having all kinds of trouble finding songs for it. She came over and I got her setup with the songs and then I proceeded to give myself a beating on the dance pad.

The last time I really played much DDR was last December. I was scoring low and breathing heavy. Too bad, I was getting pretty good before.

Sink and sunburn

Thursday I took my hobie out and I made two mistakes. I discovered the first one about 200 feet out from the dock at deer creek. I noticed the boat was riding a bit low and didn't really know why it was performing so badly. I suddenly realized I had forgotten to put in the drain plugs. I usually give the matter of jumping off of a perfectly good boat in the middle of a lake some thought, but I figured this was a situation where I didn't want to waste too much time thinking about my options. The fact that the boat tilted sharply, submerging the end of the trampoline, when I crawled toward the back also helped me commit to jumping in.

We took on enough water for the boat to ride four inches low once we got off of it. I'm not sure how many pounds of water it was, but it felt like a significant amount. We got back to the dock just in time to catch a few people there. They were kind enough to help me drain my hulls by pulling the boat onto the dock and tilting it such that all the water would run out. The left hull was draining fast for a full 5 minutes.

Another mistake I made was not putting on sunscreen. It was overcast and didn't feel like I would burn all that much. The one thing I forgot is that I could burn with sufficient exposure to a full moon. Strictly speaking I wasn't that badly burned. The only part that was really bad was the tops of my feet. I went for the sandal strap burn pattern. Once I acquired the burn I quickly realized that these sandals were all I was going to be able to wear for a few days.

My roommate suggested aloe vera lotion instead of gel. I've used about half of a bottle and I think its helping my burns quite nicely. I base this observation on previous experience with the many sunburns I have had in my life. The only thing I don't understand is why it is that sunburns take so long to develop. I was feeling fine when I got out of the sun. It was just over the next 3 hours that my burns developed into the painful things that they are. Go figure...

The biggest loss from all of this was that I wasn't able to go sailing today as I expected my burns were going hurt too much. It also doesn't help that I'm still sore from stepping the mast on thursday. It took four tries to raise it. I never supposed that rigging a hobie would be so non-trivial.