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Getting Started > > The SSH Account


Introduction

You've decided to use Safe Passage to securely tunnel your internet traffic. Perhaps you need to access files at your office from your home (or access your home computer from your office). Or, maybe you'd like to prevent other's from limiting your access to the internet. Or, you might like to prevent other's from tracing your internet activity and your location.

Whatever the reason(s) you've chosen to use Safe Passage, you only NEED two things: 1) You need Safe Passage, and 2) a login to a SSH Server. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish with Safe Passage determines where you need the SSH Server to be located. In this section, we'll take a look at each of these situations and determine what you need to do to accomplish your goal. First, what is this "SSH Account" anyway?

Secure Shell (SSH)

Long before there was a World Wide Web, there was the Internet. Before the Web, most internet users accessed servers and files by logging in to a text based terminal (otherwise known as a "shell".) They logged into these "shells" using "Telnet" - an un-encrypted protocol. Millions of people still log in to "shells", but they now (primarily) use an encrypted protocol called "Secure Shell" or "SSH". Secure Shell works much like Telnet except that all SSH traffic is encrypted and safe. The Secure Shell protocol also offers a feature called "Port Forwarding", which allows for "tunneling" non-shell traffic via a secure SSH server.

Safe Passage sets up all of your port forwarding for you, which allows all of your Internet traffic to be encrypted and sent through via your SSH server. If this shell account is on a LAN inside your office firewall, it can allow you to access LAN resources as if you were in the office. If the SSH Server you connect to with Safe Passage is in Bermuda, then as far as anyone can tell, you are sitting at that SSH server in Bermuda.

To access resources at work or home

If you want to access files or other network resources at home, while your at work (or at work, while your at home), then you need access to an SSH server at that remote location (home or work, respectively.) You could install the free OpenSSH server at home or at work (at work, you may need your network administrators permission/help.)

To secure your privacy

In order to insure your anonynmity and privacy on the internet, you should get a SSH account on an SSH server at a different geographic location (ideally using a different Internet Service Provider.) This will cause Internet hosts to believe that you are physically located at your SSH server, not your actual physical location. That is...if your SSH account is in Indonesia, then it will appear to the world that you are surfing the internet from Indonesia.

Do you suspect that your ISP or Network provider is filtering your internet traffic to prevent you from using the Internet however you wish? If so, using Safe Passage to tunnel your traffic outside your local network (and possibly "Blocking Non-Tunnel Traffic") will prevent those "spies" from analyzing your traffic, and possibly determining what you are doing on the Internet (no more Big-Brother!!).

To get out of your firewall

If you are behind a firewall and would like to freely surf and download from the Internet, then you need an SSH account on the Internet (possibly at your home on a broadband connection.) It would be best if the SSH account you were using was listening to a port that is allowed out of your network. For instance, it is common for port 22 to be blocked, but not for port 443 (secure web) to be blocked. Therefore if you find that you have trouble using Safe Passage on port 22, you may find that a host that offers SSH on port 443 will work better. You may also have to configure Proxy Settings.