Hi.

I have a simple problem. But, the universe is making it hard for me. Need some advice!

Why:
I want to use GNS3 to study for CCNA cert, but i'm in the Philippines and internet is horrible and now internet at home is disconnected.
I have decent internet at work, but i can't install anything on my work computer since i don't have admin rights.
What i can do is connect to my linode via putty.

Problem:
I want to install GNS3 on my linode and use some kind of remote session to interact with it in a GUI environment.
I have windows remote on my computer, but port RDP port is probably blocked.. Only open ports are 80 and 443 afaik.

Any creative ideas or suggestions are very much appreciated


Chris

Well unless you manually changed the SSH port, port 22 will also be available for outbound connections from your work Otherwise you couldn't SSH to it.

What you can do is X11-forwarding, that essentially allows you to forward a browser from the Linode to your PC via SSH. While it would probably work, it will be slow, especially when you do CCNA stuff, which I believe is flash-based.

Since you have Putty connectivity to your Linode, you can go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels and create localhost listeners that get routed wherever you want. I.e., you could create source port 1234 and set the destination to ip_of_a_windows_machine:3389. Once that is in place, you can RDP in to localhost:1234 and Putty will route your traffic to the Linode, which will then route it to that Windows machine.

This works great for getting around all sorts of firewall restrictions. I use Putty as a SOCKS proxy and route all my non-work related web browsing traffic via my node.

I managed to install xming without admin, but seems like it's been blocked by windows firewall.
haha. It looks like a great tool though, i'll definitely try it out when i can.

And yeah, changed my ssh port to 80

Thanks! I'll check this out when i have time

If SSH works, xming should work as well. Make sure you install xauth on your Linode, and enable X11 forwarding in the sshd config on your linode as well. You'll have to enable X11 forwarding in the putty settings as well.

Be sure to have your resume updated and your "plan b" job lined up. Most companies frown on soon to be former employees that side-step their computer/internet use policies.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Okay, i worked it out. Thanks for your help !

Portforwarded 3389 via Putty. Installed xrdp and xfce4 on ubuntu 12.04 and remoted in there like a boss
It's quite fast too