Continuing on my theme of SSH tips, today's Tip of the Day talks about the awesomeness of SOCKS proxying. As some of the more savvy among you may know, OpenSSH supports full Layer-2/Layer-3 VPN functionality using a tun device. This is an incredibly useful feature if you're off-site and need like-local access to home, work, school, or somesuch. But it requires root access, and is more than a little bit of a pita to set up. If all you need is access to things like the web, e-mail, and instant messaging, there's an easier way.

SOCKS is a transparent …

Today's *nix tip of the day involves SSH and the magic that is Agent Forwarding.

SSH, as some of you know, is a handy way to connect to *nix systems in an untrusted environment. Its primary use is to allow one to remotely access a remote system and get a shell, securely. Basically, encrypted telnet. Of course, SSH has tons of other useful features (like tunneling, proxying, and multiplexing), some of which might come up in future Tips of the Day.

One of SSH's greatest features is its public/private key system. Basically, using private keys, you can allow much …

Hello kind readers, and welcome to by *nix Tip of the Day. It's finals week, and I'm sort of slacking, so I thought I'd post some of my accumulated folk wisdom on the Internet, so that it might help others.

Today's topic is SSH Private/Public Keys. If any of you are CS majors, or go to a tech-heavy school, or generally interact with Linux/OS X/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/any other *nix, you've probably used SSH. SSH, at its most basic, is a replacement for telnet and rlogin; it allows you to get a shell at a remote machine …

Everybody in my RSS feed list is doing it. So why shouldn't I?

(no, it's not the exact same line. close enough)

% history 1 |awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head -n 20
140 cd
67 sudo
59 vim
52 mplayer
51 svn
47 rm
43 ls
33 eix
29 xsnap
29 wmiir
24 mv
22 cp
15 ps
15 killall
14 ssh
12 xset
12 history
11 man
11 evince
10 sed

Compiz 0.7 has been released. Any guesses on when it'll end up in the Gentoo repositories?

Today marks my first week back in sunny California. Actually, scratch the "sunny" part -- it's rained here almost every day since I arrived. It's still nice to be somewhere where the average daily temperature has more than one digit, though.

Class is exactly as I remembered it. Hours drag by, but days seem to end almost without beginning in the first place. I'm staying on top of my homework, which is a good thing. We'll see how well I can keep that up, particularly when biology and STEMS (signals and systems engineering) start to load it on.

I've also started …