Our IT people decided that it was a bad idea to access the Internet recently, and our beloved open-access policy was replaced with a block on all ports, with ports 80 and 443 (http and https) now routed via a proxy server. No more getting my Gmail or other POP/IMAP mail, no more MSN, Jabber, ICQ, etc.
Needless to say, I was peeved. I did some digging and came up with this absolutely wonderful little program called Proxytunnel. You see, if your network admins are anything like mine (and most are), they will have allowed you acccess to secure sites via an HTTP proxy. The thing with SSL and proxies is that because everything's encrypted, the proxy can do naught but just pass on your requests to the sites in question, and can't have any say on what protocol is used. So get Proxytunnel, drop it in /usr/local/bin or anywhere else in your path, and then do something like this:
So to access GMail's secure POP server as localhost:995, you could do:
Defining host aliases to work with default application settings
However, I have a PowerBook which I lug home most evenings, and this would cause a few problems. I can write scripts to set up and tear down all the proxy tunnels I need (one for GMail, one for a regular POP3 mail server, and one for my Jabber server), but I'd have to change all my mail, iChat etc. settings back if I was going to be able to work outside the office. So I thought of a nice solution ... why don't I just make 127.0.0.1 an alias to the hosts in my /etc/hosts file? Sure enough, I changed the line:
The rather obvious limitation is that you can only have one proxy tunnel per port, so if you want to access two services that use the same port, you're out of luck. Fortunately I use port 5222 for Jabber, 995 for GMail's secure POP, and 110 for my ISP's POP3 server, so I don't have such limitations.
Putting it all together
Now that everything works, we need a quick way to switch between the office (behind a firewall) configuration and the home (open access) configuration. I created two copies of the hosts file: the modified one as /etc/hosts.proxytunnel and the original hosts file as /etc/hosts.default. And now here comes the AppleScript. Please note that line breaks have been added for a narrower display, but they must be removed when you paste this code in Script Editor:
[robg adds: Before you try this one, keep in mind that breaking internet access policies at your place of employment may get you terminated ... which would be a high price to pay for checking your Gmail account!]
Needless to say, I was peeved. I did some digging and came up with this absolutely wonderful little program called Proxytunnel. You see, if your network admins are anything like mine (and most are), they will have allowed you acccess to secure sites via an HTTP proxy. The thing with SSL and proxies is that because everything's encrypted, the proxy can do naught but just pass on your requests to the sites in question, and can't have any say on what protocol is used. So get Proxytunnel, drop it in /usr/local/bin or anywhere else in your path, and then do something like this:
/usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 5222 -g 123.123.123.123 \
-G 8080 -d myjabberserver.com -D 5222So to access GMail's secure POP server as localhost:995, you could do:
sudo /usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 995 -g 123.123.123.123 \
-G 8080 -d pop.gmail.com -D 995/usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 9995 -g 123.123.123.123 \
-G 8080 -d pop.gmail.com -D 995Defining host aliases to work with default application settings
However, I have a PowerBook which I lug home most evenings, and this would cause a few problems. I can write scripts to set up and tear down all the proxy tunnels I need (one for GMail, one for a regular POP3 mail server, and one for my Jabber server), but I'd have to change all my mail, iChat etc. settings back if I was going to be able to work outside the office. So I thought of a nice solution ... why don't I just make 127.0.0.1 an alias to the hosts in my /etc/hosts file? Sure enough, I changed the line:
127.0.0.1 localhost127.0.0.1 localhost myjabberserver.org pop.gmail.com pop.myisp.comThe rather obvious limitation is that you can only have one proxy tunnel per port, so if you want to access two services that use the same port, you're out of luck. Fortunately I use port 5222 for Jabber, 995 for GMail's secure POP, and 110 for my ISP's POP3 server, so I don't have such limitations.
Putting it all together
Now that everything works, we need a quick way to switch between the office (behind a firewall) configuration and the home (open access) configuration. I created two copies of the hosts file: the modified one as /etc/hosts.proxytunnel and the original hosts file as /etc/hosts.default. And now here comes the AppleScript. Please note that line breaks have been added for a narrower display, but they must be removed when you paste this code in Script Editor:
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 5222 -g 123.123.123.123
-G 8080 -d myjabberserver.org -D 5222 &> /dev/null &"
with administrator privileges
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 995 -g 123.123.123.123
-G 8080 -d pop.gmail.com -D 995 &> /dev/null &"
with administrator privileges
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -a 110 -g 123.123.123.123
-G 8080 -d pop.myisp.com -D 110 &> /dev/null &"
with administrator privileges
do shell script "cp /etc/hosts.proxytunnel /etc/hosts"
with administrator privileges
do shell script "lookupd -flushcache" with administrator privileges
do shell script "cp /etc/hosts.default /etc/hosts"
with administrator privileges
do shell script "lookupd -flushcache" with administrator privileges
do shell script "killall proxytunnel" with administrator privileges
[robg adds: Before you try this one, keep in mind that breaking internet access policies at your place of employment may get you terminated ... which would be a high price to pay for checking your Gmail account!]
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