It’s Over!

23rd Aug, 2008.

Reverse SSH Tunnel

ISPs in PK don’t generally allow incoming traffic to your public IP rendering it useless, this is a real pain , when you want to access your machine from a remote location. The solution to it is a reverse ssh tunnel, which will work in the following way

[Home Machine] ==> {Middle Machine} ==> {You}

So you’ll map a port from your home machine to your middle machine , which when connected to from the middle machine will forward all traffic to your home machine. I’ll give an example on howto acheieve it.

On home machine , do this

user@home$ ssh -N -f -R 2222:localhost:22 user@middle-machine

Enter the password for your middle machine and that’s it.

Now you can connect to the middle machine from any where in the world and do

user@middle-machine$ ssh user@localhost -p 2222

and it will forward it to the ssh server running on your home machine.

Oh btw, you’ll need to change the following in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

TCPKeepAlive yes
ClientAliveInterval 30
ClientAliveCountMax 99999

Have fun

Mobilink Wimax

Here’s my post / first review of Mobilink Infinity , A new WiMax service by Mobilink GSM in Pakistan.

I just subscribed to Mobilink Infinity for 1Mbps connection. The installers came over and installed it , the over all installation experience was okay , apart from the fact that they don’t provide you the CPE password , so you cannot do any port mapping / port forwarding, so had to fight with them to get the access. The
installers told me that its a 256K connection which will be shifted to 1mbps profile by tomorrow , which on repeated requests today was shifted to 1mbps.

The service in general is pathetic , i dont know if its just me or the overall user experience , but I get wayy high ping times ( 818ms to google ) and around 14 – 20 % packet loss all the time , My 1mbps wi-max gives me around 10 – 14k ( http://tinyurl.com/5jo2ez ) where my 512kb PTCL dsl downloads fine from the same machine.

Oh while I am at it , the VoIP service they provide with the Wimax is pathetic as well , it gets disconnected again and again, the voip quality sucks and incoming calls rarely work , people tell me they get number un-reachable even when calling from Mobilink.

By the way , I am a Wateen Wi-max , Worldcall , PTCL DSL & Link.NET DSL customer and comparing Mobilink’s Wimax service with them.

Here are my scores

Installation : 7/10
Service : 0/10  ( it doesn’t work! )
Voip : 4/10
Customer Support : 8/10

I hope someone from Mobilink can help me out.

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