I needed a blog to write on a whim. The reality was Teradome was too complicated for this. Uncabled became the place to be focused on a subject. This is the flip side (but not to say completely unfocused!). teradome.com is still me, still my home domain, as much as scripting.com is still Dave's. Teradome the site has become the Me aggregator -- whenever I create a feed of activity that's worth sharing, it gets added there. The trifecta is complete. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

OPML -- making life 30x more complicated? Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I finally have the OPML Editor running in a way where I can get updates like a normal human being, but the effort expended to get a working environment to do so was tremendous.

First, I had to set up my own SSH server. That is: Find a machine at home I wanted to leave running all day. Eventually bought a machine to be a HTPC, so I selected that one. Set up firewalls and port forwards on the home router as needed. Signup with a dynamic DNS service so I can access it from the outside. Double-check the system to make sure nothing gets announced.

Then I had to find a tool to help set up tunneling on Windows. Found it in MyEnTunnel, a dedicated SSH tunnel app based on PuTTY. Configured it as a general SOCKS5 proxy.

Then I had to find a normal proxy server for OS X for apps like OPML Editor that don't understand SOCKS5. Found this in SquidMan, a GUI for the open-source Squid proxy. Configured this to only work for connections from localhost.

Then, finally, I configured an standard SSH tunnel to Squid in MyEnTunnel and used this tunnel as the proxy settings for OPML Editor.

The result? OPML Editor requests updated files through MyEnTunnel to Squid which then forwarded the request to port 5337 on updates.opml.org. OPML Editor gets back the data through the same chain. It works. I'm not happy at all with the time, money and effort it took to get it going, but it finally fucking works.