[plug] Remote machines

[Cameron Patrick]

G'day Plug,

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 02:31:38PM +0800, Leon Blackwell wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 01:56:48PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> > POP3, FTP.. to name a few other services that use plain text passwords as
> > per default.  I reckon James would be using POP3 (plain text) for mail
> > retrieval, as thats what most ISPs provide for email retrieval.
> 
> ...which they really shouldn't.  It isn't so bad doing things this way,
> as there isn't usually that far between your dialup and the POP/SMTP
> server.

Okay, I like the idea of SSH tunnelling to protect my web hosting
account, but I've been so far unable to set it up...  I have SSH access
to the provider's machine (gwaleel.pair.com) but since I don't have
shell access, my login shell has been set to /bin/passwd.  This makes
things a trifle more difficult.

Mail works fine with fetchmail's preconnect and postconnect commands:
        preconnect "ssh $ACCOUNT at gwaleel.pair.com -f -N -L 7711:localhost:110"
        postconnect "killall ssh"
The latter may not be the most elegant solution, but it appears to work.

I have not been able to set up FTP (for uploading web pages) in a
similar manner.

The first thing I tried was SFTP, which it appears their server doesn't
support:

cameron at euclid:~% sftp $ACCOUNT at gwaleel.pair.com
Connecting to gwaleel.pair.com...
$ACCOUNT at gwaleel.pair.com's password: 
Request for subsystem 'sftp' failed on channel 0
Couldn't read packet: Connection reset by peer

Then I tried to ssh port forwarding:
	ssh $ACCOUNT at gwaleel.pair.com -f -N -L 7721:localhost:21
	ftp localhost 7721
I can log in fine, but when I try to do anything interesting it doesn't
work, whether using passive mode or not:

ftp> passive
Passive mode on.
ftp> ls -l
227 Entering Passive Mode (127,0,0,1,252,236)
ftp: connect: Connection refused
ftp> passive
Passive mode off.
ftp> ls -l
200 PORT command successful.
<FTP seems to hang, I press Ctrl-C ...>
421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection

receive aborted
waiting for remote to finish abort


Does anyone know how to work around this problem?  I must admit that it
looks like FTP's brain damage is causing these problems.  pair.com claim
to support FTP-over-SSH-tunnel, and have instructions on using a
(Windows) client - which primarily consists clicking the "SSH tunnel"
button and following the wizard, which is less that wonderfully helpful.

CP.