rangerer.at

Nowadays many companies use a so-called jumphosts for access to their servers. While this makes it easier for the network admins and (if configured properly) more secure, it adds an additional hop for all the users interested in using the servers behind the jumphost.

So if a programmer wants to reach his dev server the following will happen:

programmer@workstation:~$ ssh jumphost
programmer@jumphost:~$ ssh devserver
programmer@devserver:~$ [...]

Combined with some command line switches to ssh that might be necessary to connect this is a quite tiresome exercise. In order to make life easier for the programmer the following can be added to the .ssh/config on workstation:

Host devserver
    ProxyCommand ssh jumphost nc -w5 %h %p

If you (like me) want to use your local ssh agent and the jumphost (actually jmp.yourcompany.com) has ssh running on the non-standard port 12345 (security by obscurity) a complete example could look like this:

Host jumphost
    ForwardAgent yes
    HostName jmp.yourcompany.com
    Port 12345
Host devserver
    ProxyCommand ssh jumphost nc -w5 %h %p

Your routine to connect to the devserver would go from

programmer@workstation:~$ ssh -A -p 12345 jmp.yourcompany.com
programmer@jumphost:~$ ssh devserver
programmer@devserver:~$ [...]

to

programmer@workstation:~$ ssh devserver
programmer@devserver:~$ [...]

I'm a great fan of the combination iPhone and Google Calendar. Its especially useful if you share calendars with your wife - like I do.

Setup is rather straightforward - although I use Google Mail instead of Exchange (suggested by Google) as the account type. That way I'm not able to sync contacts (which I don't need to), but everything else works better. The only difficult thing to figure out was how to activate multiple calendars for your iPhone:

Simply go to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect on your iPhone and select the calendars you want to sync. Some of your calenders (in my case public ones) might not be available, but at least you will get all private and shared ones.

Today I found out that my iPhone wasn't syncing with Google Calendar any more.

Simple solution was to go into the Google Mail account on my iPhone and de-activate Calendars and re-active them again. This seems to trigger a complete new sync and I have all my appointments on my iPhone again.