Texas A&M University has several websites and resources accessible only when you are on campus, or simply their on the campus intranet. This is good since there really isn’t any use for these sites except for the students and the faculty, such as turning in homework and library resources. The only way to access these if you are not using a computer inside the campus is to use VPN (Virtual Private Networking) or PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol). VPN is somewhat annoying to use, and PPTP is not very secure. Since I was sick of these two, I seeked out a easier method and found one.

SSH was the answer. I realize I have way too many SSH related articles, but every day I find a new use for it. Just SSH into one of the unix servers on campus with the X forwarding enabled (-X). Simply type in mozilla or what ever graphical browser they have installed, and then surf the intranet through that. You you have a fast connection, you won’t even know that your using a X forwarded application. This is a example way to connect.

# ssh username@linux.cs.tamu.edu -X
# mozilla

I am using linux.cs.tamu.edu since I have CS account, but other departments such as math (I think unix.math.tamu.edu, and for general unix.tamu.edu) would work if they have some sort of a web browser installed. If you unfortunate enough to be using Microsoft Windows, you can still get this method working. Get a hold of XliveCD which is a excellent cygwin live cd for your computer that runs on top of windows (no installation required). Just pop it in, and type the above command and you should be good to go.

You can also access your files on campus through SSH (no need to vpn then map your network drive through windows files sharing). If you want the files at the Open Access labs, use unix.tamu.edu and if you want to get the files in the Computer Science department, use one of the many *.cs.tamu.edu servers. Most file transfer clients will work with ssh file transfering (wsftp I think was one).

There are alternative methods to accessing on campus network without forwarding a browser through ssh, such as SSH tunneling. Simply bind one of your local ports (11111) to a remote host:port, and then edit your hosts file on the local machine with the domain and localhost:11111 so the dns stuff doesn’t get messed up. This works if you want just a specific site to work (in my case csnet.cs.tamu.edu). Enjoy.

edit: a much more simplified way. Run the following commands as root the first time (since you will be using below 1024 ports, and editing the hosts file)


# echo "127.0.0.1 csnet.cs.tamu.edu" //only run this command the first time you ever do this.
# ssh username@linux.cs.tamu.edu -L 80:csnet.cs.tamu.edu:80 -L 443:csnet.cs.tamu.edu:443


Thats it, now go to your browser and simply enter csnet.cs.tamu.edu and it should work flawlessly.