Accessing Home PC - Part 5

This is a 6-part discussions designed to help maximize resources on your home PC.We will show you how to turn on home PC remotely, establish a secure tunnel, remote control home PC, or see your home webcam.Remember, there are always alternative, I’m here to share with you my experience.

Use SSH as a secure tunnel or proxy server

Scenario: I’m using a public wireless network, I’m worry about someone sniffs on my network packets.  Is there a way to secure my connection…..

Although this might sound too paranoid but I always surf only unimportant web sites when I’m connecting to a public network unless I have a secure tunnel or VPN (I don’t want to rely on https only).  With secure tunnel all packets between my laptop and my home PC will be encrypted.

This is a 1-tier setup and only needs to be done on your laptop.

Setting up Laptop

To establish a secure tunnel you can use the PuTTY.exe which you have downloaded from the previous lesson.  From command line shell you can issue a command:

• -D 8080: is the local port for your browser proxy service
• -P 443: is the SSH port on your home router
• -ssh myhome.hopto.org: specify using SSH and type in your DNS

A screen will pop up to establish an SSH session:

You will login with your Windows login and password to access your SSH service.  This will establish the connection with your home PC.  To shut down this PuTTY session simply type in “exit” in the PuTTY command window.

Then from your IE browser menu, go to Tools/Internet Options/Connections Tab and click on “LAN Settings” to enable proxy.

• Address: use the 127.0.0.1
• Port: use 8080 which is the port you enter with your PuTTY command

Click OK and save the settings.  What is happening from now on is all your IE traffics will be directed to a local port 8080 which then picked up by PuTTY.  PuTTY will direct all packets to your home PC and packets get routed to Internet from there.  The response packets travel the reversed path back to your browser.  With this approach, the communications between your laptop and home PC are encrypted by SSH protocol.

Alternatively, you can use the GUI version of PuTTY.exe to save a configured session as such:

 

• Host Name: your DNS – myhome.hopto.org
• Port: 443 is your SSH port
• Connection type: SSH

Then click SSH/Tunnels to configure a dynamic routing for browser traffics:

 

• Source port: use 8080 for your local port
• Dynamic: routing for browser traffics
• Set Auto

Click Add to add this configuration and leave other settings blank then go back to previous screen to save this session.  Next time you can launch PuTTY and double click Home session to connect to your home PC.

NOTE: This secure tunneling service also works as a proxy service which you can use to pass through a blocked network.  Since all browser traffics are directed through port 443 and most of the corporate network filtering will not block port 443.

Next we are off to the setup of remote controlling your home PC.