I moved into the barracks since my wife left to stay in North Carolina with my car while I'm deployed. The day after I moved into the barracks, I had cable Internet installed; the next day I was transferred to another room and the service couldn't be transferred for four days.

In the meanwhile, I found an activity room that had a pool table, a foosball table, and a sign that says "Internet Cafe" along with an underutilized 48-port switch that feeds the cabling to a number of wall plugs that are distributed throughout the room.

The room obviously was intended to provide Internet access to users. When plugged in a DHCP server will provide the client with a public IP from Fort Hood's netblock and UDP and ICMP traffic flows pretty well. Strangely, though, a firewall blocks outgoing TCP connections to any destination port except for 35 ports, which include SSH among a few random ones (e.g. 2327).

And this is why I love OpenSSH; using OpenSSH, I can launch a SOCKS proxy that securely tunnels all traffic over a SSH tunnel in a single command without additional software.

ssh -D 1080 -p 22 user@remoteHost.com

Listen on localhost:1080 and tunnel all my traffic through the remoteHost

Of course even if they blocked all TCP traffic, I could have used NSTX or ozymandns if I really wanted to.

Anyway, although, I'm pretty sure that my access was authorized given the sign and the wiring, I'm glad to have my own Internet connection now without the need to circumvent any firewalls.

For the record -- however unrelated as it may be -- another reason I love SSH is because after booting off a live CD you can image one hard drive onto a remote box using just SSH and the standard dd utility: ssh -l root host ’dd if=/dev/hda’ 2> /dev/null | dd of=/dev/hda