While OpenVPN is a powerful VPN client, it is rather difficult to setup/configure. If you had difficulty with OpenVPN, you can use PuTTY with Astro to create a “poor man’s VPN”. You will configure PuTTY to “tunnel” traffic through SSH to Astro, and will be able to access resources as if you are local to Temple.
To configure this, open PuTTY, and create a session for Astro:
- On the left, select “Session” from the tree
- After typing in the host name for Astro, fill in the “Saved Sessions” text box
- Click the “Save” button… this will now appear in the list of saved sessions. In the future, you can simply double click the saved session to open it
Next, configure the tunnel to Astro; we will use port 80 to demonstrate this, though you could use any port/host for a service you would like to access at Temple:
- On the left, expand SSH from the tree
- Select the “Tunnels” item
- Add a new tunnel with a source port of 7880, and a destination of 127.0.0.1:80
- This will redirect any traffic on your machine going to the “source” port to 127.0.0.1 on Astro, using the specified port. 127.0.0.1 is the address of Astro, but this could be the IP/Port of any service running on the LAN accessible to Astro
- Save the changes by clicking “Save” in the sessions tab
- Click open to connect to Astro, and log in
Once connected, try accessing Astro using a web browser on your own computer, using the URL http://127.0.0.1:7880
Did this work? Take a screen shot, and submit for this assignment.