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paulddraper

Recently on a cruise ship I found my SSH access blocked.

And HTTP proxies were blocked too.

So I used a WebSocket proxy and that worked great. I highly recommend wstunnel.

https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel

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Wait, so how did you start the other end of the tunnel if you were already on the cruise ship with restricted access? Did you already have it running ahead of time?

Google's cloud shell is handy for this, provided you trust them for this narrow use.

I was still in cell range when I discovered that, so I tethered and set up an AWS micro with wstunnel.

Otherwise, I could have done it with my web browser, using EC2 user data scripts, but that would have taken longer to get right.

Nice find! Thanks. I have some other tools for being productive from "constrained" environments. I'm running ttyd [1] exposed trough nginx (to deal with auth and ssl) which gives me a terminal in the browser (using xtermjs). It's pretty good. Another option I used before was shellinabox [2] (also trough nginx). Terminal emulation is not the greatest. For GUI access i use NoVNC (exposed trough nginx) and have a systemd unit starting vncserver session.

[1] https://github.com/tsl0922/ttyd [2] https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox [3] https://github.com/novnc/noVNC

> P.S: Please do not pay attention to Main.hs because as I hate to write command line code this file is crappy

Well thank you for directing me to the most entertaining readme I've seen in a while... Though of course we should appreciate a developer willing to admit to their weak spots; good show.

You may enjoy this README, written by a friend: https://github.com/tbodt/ish#a-note-on-the-jit

> So a warning: Long-term exposure to this code may cause loss of sanity, nightmares about GAS macros and linker errors, or any number of other debilitating side effects. This code is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm.

Beautiful; thanks for sharing:)

Don't get fooled, this is a maintainer's trick to make you read the code (and Main.hs is the entry point!). :-)

"Recently on a cruise ship I found my SSH access blocked."

...

"And HTTP proxies were blocked too."

What would the possible rationale for this be ? I can understand these being blocked in, say, a non-western hotel inside mainland China ... or in a .gov lobby ... or ... ?

But on a cruise ship - the maintainers of that network must know that guests on the ship might have remote work to do - or just workflows that involve something beyond "the web".

Further, the bandwidth generated by web usage typically dwarfs bandwidth usage over VPNs or actual SSH ...

What are they thinking ?

They have likely blocked every port except 80 and 443, in a misguided attempt to either limit bandwidth or increase security. I have seen such systems in some hospitals, it was pretty annoying.

A bandwidth thing. They also had bandwidth limits, but I think they were playing big brother to stop disgruntled customers from running out after watching 8.5 minutes of Netflix.

> that network must know that guests on the ship might have remote work to do - or just workflows that involve something beyond "the web"

You'd think so.

This particular cruise line (Holland America) is known for its older travelers.

Any indication if it was deep packet inspection or just a port block?

Deep packet. That's how they got HTTP proxies too.

Were VPN's blocked too?

Definitely. I doubt you'll ever see SSH blocked but not VPNs.

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