Apr 27 2009
Free VPN, Secure too
What is SSH tunneling?
SSH is a secure way to log on to a computer remotely. Mac OS X has SSH built-in. Tunneling is using an encrypted SSH connection to forward ports.
Why would you want to do this? SSH tunneling can secure VNC sessions over the internet. In fact, you can route any kind of TCP traffic like HTTP and FTP. The next two utilities make it easy to connect securely over an SSH connection.
We’ve featured Fugu for its SFTP capabilities. This utility also creates tunnels for accessing other services on SSH connected machines.
You’ll need to know the IP of the remote Mac and the ports you want to forward. Once connected, you can use your local IP (127.0.0.1) to connect to the remote Mac in VNC or your application of choice.
This utility is a bookmark manager for connections to Unix machines. It will manage saved connection settings for remote Macs.
As you can probably guess, this utility is for more than remote terminal sessions. You can save tunnel settings for each connection making it easy to reconnect your frequently used tunnels.
If you more of the zero-configuration type, you’ll be interested in Hamachi. This free VPN application uses a free online service to connect your and our friends’ computers to a network you create. Hamachi navigates NAT firewalls to join computers on these networks.
HamachiX is a OS X front-end for a terminal client made by the Hamachi project. With a little work you can stream your iTunes to other Macs or PCs all over the ‘net.
Happy VPN tunneling!