SSH Tunnels: The corporate developer's WD40 + Gaffer Tape

So at my current site the dreaded Authenticating Proxy policy has been instigated - one of those classic corporate network-management patterns that may make sense for the 90% of users with their locked-down Windows/Active Directory/whatever setups, but makes life a miserable hell for those of us playing outside on our Ubuntu boxes.

In a nice display of classic software-developer passive-aggression we've been keeping track of the hours lost due to this change - we're up to 10 person-days since the policy came in 2 months ago. Ouch.

Mainly the problems are due to bits of open-source software that simply haven't had to deal with such proxies - these generally cause things like Jenkins build boxes and other "headless" (or at least "human-less") devices to have horrendous problems.

I got super-tied-up today trying to get one of these build boxes to install something via good-old apt-get in Ubuntu. In the end I used one of my old favourite tricks, the SSH Tunnel backchannel to use the proxy that my dev box has authenticated with, to get the job done.

Here's how it goes:

Preconditions:

• dev-box is my machine, which is happily using the authenticated proxy via some other mechanism (e.g. kinit)
• build-box is a build slave that is unable to use apt-get due to proxy issues (e.g. 407 Proxy Authentication Required)
• proxy-box is the authenticating proxy, listening on port 8080

 proxy-box            dev-box            build-box
    ---                 ---                ---
    | |                 | |                | |
    | |                _____               | |
    | 8080    < < <    _____    < < <   7777 |
    | |                 | |                | |
    | |                 | |                | |
    ---                 ---                ---
     
   

From dev-box

ssh build-box -R7777:proxy-box:8080

Welcome to build-box
> sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf

.. and create/modify apt.conf as follows:

Acquire::http::proxy "http://localhost:7777/";

At which point, apt-get should start working, via your own machine (and your proxy credentials). Once you're done, you may want to revert your change to apt.conf, or you could leave it there, with an explanatory comment of how and why it has been set up like this (or just link to this post!)