Living behind a firewall can be a lonely and disparaging place to be. Using ssh's port forwarding capabilities has become an essential task to get through the day. Every few months something is closed off, and I add one more item to my morning startup routine. Opening ports to IRC, streaming music, and most recently mail are the first order of business at my business.

I have a machine in my home's DMZ, and my router will let all ssh traffic go to that machine. There is not a lot on that machine, it just provides extra help to my home machines, and lets my play with Ubuntu Linux.

To connect to IRC, I set host as locahost instead of irc.gnome.org host in Gaim. Every morning I issue the command: ssh -C -N -f -L 6667:irc.gnome.org:6667 user@my.home.ip

I just login to my IRC account, and ssh sends all my irc traffic over ssh to my computer that can talk over port 6667.

I can connect to irc.freenode.net at the same time. I use 6668:irc.freenode.net:6667 and get the port to 6668 and host to locahost in Gaim.

To listen to Indy Pop Rocks on SomaFM, I set its address as http://localhost:8076 in Totem. I use: ssh -C -N -f -L 8076:server1.somafm.com:8076 user@my.home.ip

to do the routing. I could also be streaming from one of my home computers using icecast. I would use something like 8080:transmitter.local:8080 to see it.