Off Campus the easy Way
I've written before about the importance of testing resources from off-campus so I might be repeating myself here but it is well worth it. I've mentioned things like RDP, and VNC (plug... Computers in Libraries January 2009 for the details) but perhaps the best way to do it is with Squid. What happens is that you set up Squid on your home computer (or somewhere off campus) and then use that connection to test out off-campus configurations.
Installing Squid under Ubuntu is fairly easy:
sudo apt-get install squid
Once installed you are going to have to get it running.
- Change the
/etc/squid/squid.conffile and add an entry forvisble_hostname. (use the IP address of the machine running Squid as an example) - Poke a hole in your firewall to send traffic from 3128 to the machine running Squid (this is the default Port Squid will run on which can also be changed in
/etc/squid/squid.conf) - change some permissions so that squid will work:
sudo chown -R proxy:proxy /var/log/squid/sudo chown proxy:proxy /etc/squid/squid.conf
- You need to add a few lines to your squid conf file to allow access from the computers you want to test with, the best way is to add something similar to squid.conf:
acl library src 10.57.125.0/24 http_access allow library
- (Where the IP and mask matches your setup)
- Start Squid using:
sudo /etc/init.d/squid start - Configure your browser on site to use your Squid instance at home to do traffic
The last step above can be made a lot easier if you make use of a proxy switching toolbar. In firefox you can use some like SwitchProxy
Now you'll get all of your traffic going through your off-campus machine. So that means when you activate your Squid proxy all the traffic going through your browser will go through your off-site machine. That way you can be sure that your configurations are set properly.
