Anyone set up a SSH tunnel to their (rooted) G1 for browsing?

[f4phantomii]

Many people use proxies to either circumvent firewalls or site blocking at their workplace. Others have started using SSH tunnels and going through a proxy to their home linux box for a little extra privacy while surfing.

While the SSH tunnel does add some privacy from snoopy IT types and net admins, it can also be a double edged sword. It may raise a red flag to the net admin when they see a bunch of traffic and packets flowing through a SSH connection. They won't know what it is, but they'll see where it's coming from and where it's headed to. That may be more likely to get an employee in hot water than normal surfing.

So I was wondering if anyone had set up a SSH server on their rooted G1 and had set up a tunneling proxy for surfing. In theory that should be possible if you can SSH into your phone remotely, which I think can be done.

If the phone is connected via USB and the SSH connection is made that way, then that should pretty much completely remove the traffic from an employer's network.

I realize one could just use the browser on the G1, but sometimes it's nice to have a full keyboard and large screen.

Seems like this might be an easier way of tethering....sort of a tether-lite. Maybe not.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

[ickyfehmleh]

A coworker thought about doing something similar.

After realizing his job pays for his mortgage and there is an "economic downturn" he decided not to put things in jeopardy just because he wants to look at some boobies during the day.

[f4phantomii]

My interest is more for the occasional site that is blocked by our network filters. Sometimes they catch the dumbest things and prevent us from looking at legitimate sites.

For example, froogle.google.com is blocked, yet shopping.yahoo.com is not. Any site which it deems as freeware/shareware is blocked, which means I cannot avail myself of any of the fine projects on Sourceforge.net despite the fact that it would be for business purposes.

Gmail and any other webmail is blocked. We are also not allowed to do image searches.

My company is trying to protect it's network. I'm trying to do my job. I'm comfortable defending anything I'm surfing. But I would like some workarounds for when legitimate sites are blocked erroneously or when blocked sites offer a solution to a business-related problem I'm trying to solve.

As I said, I could do a SSH tunnel through to my linux box, but I have a feeling that might cause more problems than it solved, and as you point out, in uncertain economic times, it's probably best to avoid that type of scrutiny.

If I can do it completely independent of the company network, everybody is happy. Besides....If I wanted to stare at some racks, I would have just downloaded the Jack and Jiggle app.

[dwang]

You could try connectbot..

http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/

I tried it myself and couldn't get it to work. If you get it to work please post the solution here.

Thanks,
Dave

[f4phantomii]

ConnectBot is a SSH *client*.

I currently use it to connect to my linux box at home.

What I would need is a SSH *server* actually running on the G1. That means I'd probably have to install busybox and a few other items on the phone in order to run those utilities. Hopefully I could go with a very light-weight linux distro, and ideally I could just install the binaries without the overhead of a full distro. But I'm not sure how feasible that is.

[endolith]

It's not just for accessing objectionable sites at work. My work doesn't have any filters, but I still have trouble accessing some sites due to network issues, which I can access fine when tunneling through my home router. It also lets you transfer files from home, if you do some of your work there. I've also used my SSH tunnel to access whatever I want while in China on business, regardless of the Great Firewall.

I'm primarily interested in this to encrypt my traffic while surfing on public access points, though. Even if you accidentally connect to a spoofed malicious AP, they can't see what you're doing; only that you're connecting to a remote machine.