Another geeky post, but today I finally got around to making a note of my computer’s IP address, putting PuTTY onto my iRiver*, and trying to ssh into my computer from one of the machines on campus. I originally set up sshd on Monday night (hence my learing about the /etc/hosts.* files), but on both Tuesday and Wednesday I forgot to do either of the things I needed to do before coming into campus to test it out, and only today did I finally get around to it (actually, three days isn’t bad going compared with how long it can be before I get around to remembering something like that). And it worked just fine!

My main concern, having set it up so that I could ssh in from the machine itself, was that the university firewall would block out the connection. I couldn’t remember whether it blocked out all incoming conections from outside the whole .soton.ac.uk domain, or the halls subdomain, but fortunately it turned out to be the latter.

Of course, considering how easy it was to get set up and working, it can’t really be considered all that much of an achievement, but for some reason I feel ever so pleased with myself.

Now I just have to find some actual use for being able to log into my box remotely from campus. I might try and get a console email client like Mutt set up, but that’s the only useful thing I can think of at the moment.

*Files are tranferred on and off using USB mass storage, so it can be used as a portable hard disk as well as a music player. In fact that’s about all it’s good for until I retrieve the headphones.