aka…when things just work.

For whatever reason, I set up AFP (Apple File Protocol) on my Linux box at home just to play with it and how it interacted with my mactop. Well, I’m on the road this week and brought my Powerbook with me. Wondering if AFP would be any more flexible than other networking filesystems, I googled around for AFP over SSH solutions. Before looking at the results, I tried tunneling TCP port 548, but received an error about not being able to access localhost. Eventually I came across this Mac OS X Security guide. Right on page 29, it mentions you can easily tunnel AFP over SSH on any arbitrary port!

ssh <username@afp-server> -L 10548:127.0.0.1:548

And then simply Connect to a Server and use: afp://localhost:10548

Awesome! I had to change it a little bit as my public SSH server and AFP server are on different hosts, but it worked like a charm!

Security software, however, does not always work the first time around. But tonight I was playing around with whax in preparation for some wifi testing. Slid in the CD, rebooted, and it was up and running shortly. Wireless card detected, Kismet worked fine after configuration, USB drive worked great, and the KDE gui is reaaaal pretty. Wine is even installed for a few of the win32 binaries. And I was happy to see that Absinthe also ran without a problem. Slick!