Christian Geekery

Have you ever found yourself in a coffee shop using their network while wondering who was watching your traffic?  I know that I do.

So with that in mind and access to an Amazon account, I decided to see how hard it is to setup squid on an Amazon instance, open a ssh tunnel from my laptop to squid, and configure Firefox to use the tunnel/proxy.  As it turns out it was very easy and now I have an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that I can fire up when I find myself working in a coffee shop.

Setting up was easy.  I started up my base gentoo instance, logged in, and installed squid.
emerge squid

I did not need to do anything to the configuration, so I just started squid
/etc/init.d/squid start

Then I created the ssh tunnel
ssh -i ec2-keypair -f -N -L3128:localhost:3128 root@hostname

Then all I had to do was set my Firefox Proxy settings to “localhost” port “3128″.  Once I was done all I had to do was shut down tho ssh tunnel and turn off proxy in Firefox.

My next steps will be to write a script to start up the instance and the tunnel.  Not too shabby, and secure enough to foil most any snooping coffee shop individual.

After a few fits and starts, I am getting back to Amazon EC2. A few months ago I started looking at this and even created an ami (Amazon Machine Image) by modifying an existing ami, bundling it up, stuffing the ami into a S3 bucket, and registering it with Amazon.  Unfortunately I had to set this aside for a while to deal with more pressing matters.  Now with the more pressing matters resolved (at least for the moment) I can get back to EC2

My first real project will be setting up nagios to monitor some of my web servers from outside my network.  So with that in mind I fired up a gentoo ami with mysql,php, and apache.  As I am writing this post, I am waiting for the image to finish uploding to S3 so that I can register it, fire it up and start getting nagios installed and running.  Once I get nagios running I will update the bundle so that I don’t loose any of my work.  Next I plan to look into making it more robust so that it can handle crashes without loosing much if any nagios history.