tip connect to PC behind firewall

This is a very nice tip on this topic from

Comfortable SSH Access to a Computer Behind a Firewall

Rationale

Sometimes your university takes security serious and firewalls every computer on their intranet, even if you are interested to access it from outside. The following steps enable a comfortable, nearly transparent SSH tunnel to penetrate the firewall. All that is needed is a computer outside with SSH access that can operate as a relay.

The software needed should be already installed on any current unix system: secure shell client/server and netcat (nc).

Server Configuration

Login to the computer behind the firewall.

1. Generate a new ssh private key that is to be used as the authentication for the tunnel. It will have no password to enable automatic login.
   

   ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/tunnel-id -t rsa -N ""

2. Create a new entry in your ~/.ssh/config that will be used to initiate the tunnel. Set the Host entry to an uncommon name so that you will also be able to login to the relay computer normally. It will establish a connection from port 11111 on the loopback interface on the relay computer to the ssh port on the loopback interface on the server.
   

   Host relay
   HostName relay.hostname.com
   RemoteForward 11111 localhost:22
   IdentityFile  ~/.ssh/tunnel-id

3. Copy the public key to the relay server:
   

   ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/tunnel-id relay.hostname.com

4. To make it easy to start the tunnel, create a script in ~/bin/setup-tunnel.sh:
   

   while true; do 
       /usr/bin/ssh relay
       sleep 1
   done < /dev/null & disown

Relay Configuration

Login to the relay computer.

1. The ssh-copy-id appended the public key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Because we want to limit the havoc that can be caused by the key, change the entry that was just created
   

   ssh-rsa AAAAB3...= user@server.domain.com

   to
   

   command="sleep 604800" ssh-rsa AAAAB3...= user@server.domain.com

   This will give the tunnel a livetime of a week, make it work without a local terminal on the server side (we used < /dev/null) and limit the commands that can be executed with this key.

Client Configuration

Login to the client computer.

1. To make it possible to transparently connect to the server through the tunnel, we use netcat on the relay computer and a ProxyCommand in the ~/.ssh/config file on the client. Add a new entry with
   

   Host server
   HostName server.hostname.com
   ProxyCommand ssh relay.hostname.com bin/nc localhost 11111

Usage

Whenever you want to have the tunnel enabled, start ~/bin/setup-tunnel.sh on the server. Afterwards you will be able to connect from the client with ssh server. You will be asked for a password two times, once for the relay and once for the server.
The following diagram shows the general idea of the created tunnel:

+--------+ ( ) +----------------------+ | Client |------( Internet )---->| relay.hostname.com | +--------+ ( ) +----------------------+ : /|\   : |   : [ X ]   : |   : Forwarded ssh connection +-------------------+   :..............................>| server.domain.com |   over "server" ssh alias +-------------------+     --- real connection   ... virtual connection   [X] switch

Collect evolution to MS exchange server 2007 via DavMail

Using DavMail as a bridge, edit account, receive server as 

localhost:1110 etc, works well. It retrieves mails in inbox. 

Some suggests that imap will get new mail from all folders. 

I got a error. Back to pop at the time being.

Davmail can used as bridge for fetchmail too

here is a example of fetchmailrc

poll localhost
 port 1110
        with protocol pop3
        username DOMAIN\user password mypasswd keep is localuser;

Build Evolution from Source Made Simple

 http://mad-scientist.us/evolution.html

Evolution site

 http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/index.shtml