Last week I was stuck in a hotel located in the middle of a forest with crappy GPRS signal so my mobile internet wasn’t any good. On top of this the ‘free’ wifi at the hotel provided only web traffic connectivity ( ports 80 and 443). Sure, a smart guy would run a VPN over port 443 and would be on his way. Unfortunately I’m not that guy. I struggled getting some remote ssh server listening on port 80 and in the end managed to do my thing.

Reading Hacker news today I stumbled upon a cool piece of softare: sshuttle. Acording to the developer, it allows you to seamlessly run traffic over ssh in a VPN kinda way, but without the vpn hassle. All you need is a working ssh connection and sudo rights on your machine. Traffic gets somehow redirected via ipfw or iptables to the ‘tunnel’ and out it goes to the remote ssh endpoint. I just tested this with a couple of remove ssh servers and it works pretty good. Ah yes, and it’s open source so you can inspect the code for funny stuff..

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle