Linux is cool

You know what my punkasses.sh one-liner is called? An active blocking, intrusion preventing, adaptive firewall. Rather, that's what it's called when it's stuck inside a fancy looking piece of network hardware and charge thousands of dollars for it. It amazes me that people really don't seem to grasp that Linux can do pretty much anything you want. A bit ago the company was looking at these "tunneling" boxes; expensive hardware which allows encrypted access to the network with a very light client. I, of course, knew BS when I saw it, and about an hour later had the ssh server available to the world, and a document on establishing a port-forwarding puTTY (SSH) tunnel. You connect via puTTY, log in, and then RDP to localhost:forwardedport to get to the terminal server, or set your mail server to localhost:forwardedport to use your outlook when away from the office, all encrypted though an SSH tunnel, all with existing technology, on existing hardware, and freely available software. Beautiful.

(man, that was a terrible title)