Pete's Log: I love it when a plan comes together
Entry #1575, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 29 years old.)
The situation: in a corporate network, 10.x.y.z IP, only access to outside world is an HTTP Proxy. This HTTP Proxy is friendly enough to allow generic connects.
The goal: connect to another corporate network, 10.0.0.0/8 addresses, access only possible via a PPTP VPN.
At your disposal: a friendly network with an OpenVPN gateway, ssh access, and various UNIX and Windows hosts, including a VMWare server.
- SSH Tunnel for PPTP Port doesn't work, because PPTP is an IP protocol, not a TCP one (OK, technically it's based on GRE).
- PPTP via OpenVPN doesn't work because networks on both ends are 10.0.0.0/8 networks and the routing gets screwed up.
- A VM on my local machine could have got around the routing issue, but while I have VMWare installed, I don't have any OS images with me (a tactical error, I know).
Here's what I came up with:
Could you have done any better?
What amazed me, though, was that copy and paste from an application on the laptop to an application on the destination workstation worked. Every once in a while, technology does seem to work. Even though it would be nice if PPTP had some way to allow itself to be tunneled via TCP.