Linux is your friend

I realized that I had been writing about linux for a few posts now, but I never actually described what linux actually is!  Although that is rather vague and I could go on for days trying to describe, I'm just gonna give you the short bit.

Linux is an open sourced operating system that can be used as an alternative to Windows or Mac operating systems.  What is open sourced you ask?  Well, that is another novel itself.  Basically, open source software is any software that has been licensed to be free.  Not free as in beer, but free as in speech.  Many of the linux and open source software advocates say that open source software, like linux, encourages innovation and provides people with viable free alternatives to restrictive software made by people like Microsoft.

So what does this mean?  It means that you can utilize this large community to harness the hidden power of your PC, and without having to spend a dime!

The thing about linux is that it's not one operating system.  Because it is open sourced, there are literally hundreds of different distributions to choose from.  If you're interested, you should check out one of the most popular distributions over at http://www.ubuntu.com

What's SSH?

Dealing with multiple networks in different physical locations, such as I do, requires me to figure out ways to make my job and my life easier.  That's why I now use SSH to help me with the many different applications and networks that I work with.  SSH is short for secure shell and it can be summarized simply as an encrypted tunnel between two end points.  The reason that SSH is such a utility knife in the IT world is because of the many things that you can use in conjunction with SSH. 

One simple but effective feature is something called port forwarding.  There are different kinds that can be used for different purposes.  Local forwarding allows you to tell your local machine that if you make a request for a tcp/udp connection on a specific port that is specified in your SSH tunnel, it will in turn forward the connection to a port on the remote machine that you also specified in the SSH tunnel. 

What this means is that you can push applications through the tunnel and vice versa.  For example, say you want to use a remote desktop application to a computer at your home, but the only port you have opened from the outside of your firewall/NAT router is to your SSH server.  No problem!  All you do is setup a connection to your SSH server at home and specify that you want to forward say port 8000 locally to the ip address of the target machine and port 3389 on the remote side.  After the connection is setup, all you have you have to do is setup up your remote desktop to connect to the IP you specified on port 8000 and tada!  You now have a remote desktop connection to your computer at home! 

This is only an introduction to SSH.  There are a million and one things that you can do using SSH.  If you would like to play with SSH, you can install it on any operating system.  Check out open SSH to learn more at their website.  I will post some other interesting things in the future that you can do with SSH.  Until then, good luck and have fun!