Aim and SSH?

[Oaki]

Hey all,

Long time for me since my last post. I have a real brain teaser for you. Is it possible to tunnel an AIM connection through SSH? I've been working on this one all day and can't seem to figure it out. I've been googling for the past 3 hours, and experimenting with my own machines.

The reason i'm trying to do this is, my school finally got smart and blocked off the AIM ports, which I don't like. I don't really know if i'm even doing it right, I don't have that great of a grasp of how tunneling is usually done though ssh. Do you have to be able to SSH into the server you are attempting to log into? Can you set up port forwarding just on a linux machine? I'm so lost......

[Gertrude]

Install putty and SSH to your home computer, and use naim. its a command line aim client. or set up a VPN.

[serz]

Using SSH, use centericq that supports lots of IM protocols.

[Oaki]

Well, I did some experimenting and got the results i was going for. I thought i'd share this with anyone else who may be curious. I know there were easier ways of getting onto AIM, but i wanted to have the GUI. Anyway, here's basically what i did.

I got ssh running, with the putty client on windows. That connects to my gentoo machine at home running sshd, and a proxy server. For the proxy i chose tinyproxy. From there the proxy connects to the AIM servers. The reason for this is: the AIM logon server is different from the one you are connected to for actually talking to people. The proxy takes care of this for you, everything comes back to sshd as just one connection, one ip, one port, and is sent back along to the client on the windows box, and ultimately the AIM client. The AIM client has to be set as follows:

Logon server is login.oscar.aol.com, but the port is changed to the port that your proxy will use, which i set as 8888. Then you have to chose to use a proxy. Set the proxy as localhost, and the port as 8888. You set putty to forward port 8888 local, to 8888 on the server, which is sent packing along to the proxy.


Hope that helps some people who are attempting to do what i did. I could not find a single page describing how anyone else had accomplished this, but I did read many of people who tried and failed. I feel special now. If anyone has a better idea that actually works let me know, i'd like to hear it.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Wow. great howto.

You should cut and copy this into the "How I did it" forum. I'm sure a lot of other people would be interested in finding out how to do this.