Get access to locked down services behind firewalls from your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad with a simple toggle

What can I say? I'm just lazy to sit down and write the whole thing however, I sketched out the process of how it should all work.  If you are familiar with SSH Tunneling, then this should make sense.  The purple arrows demonstrate the process flow from beginning to end as shown by the numbers on the arrows.  Hopefully I'll get to write this piece out soon.  By the way, this has been tested and it works.  You can use your mobile device as a gateway to tunnel to your secure network which would then allow (as an example) to stream your movies, music from another computer on the same network where the mobile device is connected to.  This would give you the flexibility to use bigger monitors for convenience.  The data will flow through your mobile device so that will drain your battery so quickly.  The assumption here is to have your mobile device connected to your charger through the USB or electrical outlet cable.  Some may argue that this method is an overkill and would suggest to use something like putty or cygwin to create the tunnel on the computer that needs access to the files.  Yes you can do that but here are some things to consider if you decide to go that route:

  1. How well do you trust the target computer?  I'm not comfortable sharing my configurations and private keys when establishing tunnels using something like putty on the target computer.
  2. Portability.  Putty is not portable and having to set up your tunnel is somewhat time consuming if you don't have all the tools for that including the right permissions.  Accessing an SSH server behind a proxy requires a proxy tunnel program like proxytunnel or corkscrew.  Have fun setting that up.  Oh true, you have it on your USB stick.  What if there are no USB ports available or the administrator decided to disable them?.  Again, something to consider here.  Besides, have you heard of the latest USB viruses out there where they sit dormant waiting to snatch all your files off your USB stick?
  3. If you know what you are doing, you can toggle the tunnel on or off on your mobile device giving you quick access to your services.  If you don't already know, a jailbroken iDevice gives you the opportunity to toggle services on and off.
     
Leverage the power of your mobile device to act as a gateway to your movies, music and files.


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