ssh to home computer to check my email

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Level 1

130 points

ssh to home computer to check my email

I have an iBook G4 and PowerMac G5. I want to leave the G5 on at home and ssh to an account on the G5 while away from home using the iBook connecting over a public wifi spot. My goal is to somehow check my email SECURELY once I successfully connect to my G5. Can this be done somehow?

My ISP doesn't support creating an ssh tunnel to securely connect to my ISP and get mail from my pop3 account, so that is out.

When I tested using ssh to the G5, I could open Apple Mail, but it appears on the G5, and there is no way for me to get the mail over the ssh connection to the iBook so I can look at the mail.

Since Apple Mail is not an X11 application, X11 Forwarding will probably not work.

I'm guessing VNC is my only choice here. Is that so? I really don't need to see the G5 screen on my iBook after I ssh in, I simply want some way to retrieve the mail from the G5 and bring it to my iBook for reading.

I don't know anything about setting up a mail server, but I do have a spare G3 B&W PowerMac at home. Is there some way to make it a mail server that can retrieve mail from my ISP via the DSL modem and THEN I use my iBook to ssh into the B&W G3 to retrieve my mail?

If anyone can point me to a website to do any of this or they can explain how to set up a workable solution to let me get my email, please post it here.

PowerMac G5 Dual 2 GHz (rev 2) & 20 Cinema Disp. Mac OS X (10.4)

Posted on Nov 28, 2005 4:41 PM

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Answer 1

jarik

Level 4

1,005 points

Nov 28, 2005 5:00 PM in response to Applemaz

It's a "kludge" solution, but you could leave Mail running on the G5, then remotely scp the mailboxes over, and import them to your laptop Mail program. Ugly, but would work.

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Answer 2

TheQ

Level 2

165 points

Nov 29, 2005 3:11 AM in response to Applemaz

If I understand your requirements correctly, you are wanting to find a secure way to check your mail from a wifi hostspot, you don't necessary NEED to use ssh, or check it using your G5 at home.

Rather than trying to kludge something together using ssh, I would recommend looking at OpenVPN first. OpenVPN is a pretty simple to setup VPN client/server that will allow you to establish a secure tunnel for ALL IP traffic between the iBook and G5. You should then be able to do all your internet activities routed securely via your home connection, secure from sniffing by other wifi users. If all you are doing is checking email, then this could be as simple as enabling 'Leave mail in the server' on both mac's or using IMAP (if your ISP supports it).

I have used OpenVPN successfully to do a similar thing on FreeBSD, and there is a GUI app for the Mac called Tunnelblick that is supposed to make things nice and simple, however I have not tried it.

PS: This topic was discussed recently on Steve Gibson's Security Now Podcast (available on iTunes). I recommend you listen to it.

Seeya...Q

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Answer 3

Applemaz Author

Level 1

130 points

Nov 29, 2005 7:50 AM in response to TheQ

I assume I have to install OpenVPN on the server (G5) and the client (iBook), but only need to run TunnelBlick on the iBook, since that is the client. Is this correct?

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Answer 4

Applemaz Author

Level 1

130 points

Nov 29, 2005 7:04 PM in response to Applemaz

Actually, here is what I finally decided upon. I installed Xcode Tools on my PowerMac G5 at home and then installed Pine on this same machine. After configuring Pine to get and send mail, I can now simply use my iBook while on the road and ssh into my home PM G5 then open a Terminal and run Pine to get and send emails.

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Answer 5

Nov 30, 2005 5:44 PM in response to Applemaz

It sounds like you want to be able to download mail from your ISP using your laptop, but you wanted to have a secure connection throught the public wifi hotspot. Since your ISP doesn't support SSL or an ssh tunnel, you wanted to setup an ssh tunnel to your home machine, and check from there.

You don't need to use Terminal and Pine to do this. You can use Apple Mail on your laptop with an ssh tunnel to your home machine, and setup that tunnel to forward POP traffic to your ISP. The connection between your laptop and your home machine will be secure, but the connection between your home machine and the ISP will not be (as I presume it isn't when you check mail at home anyway).

To do this, you just need to setup port forwarding when you start the ssh session. I do this with an entry in my .ssh/config file on the laptop like this:

Host home
User user-name
Hostname your.home.ip.address
LocalForward 9110 pop.yourisp.net:110
LocalForward 9025 smtp.yourisp.net:25

(The "user-name" would be the user name you login with on your home machine.)

Now you can type "ssh home" and, while your session is open, you'll have a tunnel from 127.0.0.1:9110 to the POP server at your ISP, and a tunnel from 127.0.0.1:9025 to the SMTP server at your ISP.

Then make an Apple Mail account with incoming mail server set to 127.0.0.1 and (under the advanced tab) port set to 9110, and you'll be able to download your mail securely. To send mail using your ISP's SMTP server, just configure the outgoing mail server (SMTP) for that account as 127.0.0.1 and the server port as 9025.

If your home machine is setup to constantly check mail even while you're away, you'll need to make sure that it's set to leave mail on the server for at least a day or more (depending on how often you intend to check mail on the road).

For even more fun, put this LocalForward command with the other two:

LocalForward 9548 127.0.0.1:548

Now, you can securely mount your home machine's hard disk on your laptop over afp whenever the tunnel is open. From the Finder, just go Go > Connect to Server... and type in "afp://127.0.0.1:9548/".

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