Jul

1

Getting ClamXav to use a Proxy Server

Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security, System Administration on July 1, 2011 | 4 Comments

I’ve been looking at different free Mac AV solutions so that I can make recommendations to less-computer-savy family members, and this afernoon I decided to give ClamXav a go. I’d tried it a few years ago and wasn’t very happy, but I’d been told by friends that it has improved a lot since, and a first glance at the GUI suggests they’re right. Unfortunately I didn’t get very far with my initial testing this afternoon because I’m in an environment where I have to use an HTTP proxy server to access the net, and ClamXav appears not to support proxies at first glance. It ignores OS X’s system-wide proxy settings, and it has no interface elements of its own to allow you to specify a proxy server manually. This implies that ClamXav doesn’t support proxies, but it actually does, they just didn’t bother to expose that functionality through the GUI.

ClamXav is just a GUI wrapper for the free and open source Clam AntiVirus toolkit, and it uses Clam’s regular auto-updating tool freshclam. Although the ClamXav GUI doesn’t give you control over the variables in the freshclam configuration file, that file does exist as part of ClamXav (/usr/local/clamXav/etc/freshclam.conf), and if you edit it manually it will respect the settings specified in that file. If you’re not afraid of the Terminal, you can easily edit this configuration file manually to get ClamXav to use a proxy server for updates.

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Dec

7

SSH via a Socks proxy on OS X with connect.c

Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on December 7, 2005 | 15 Comments

NOTE: tested on OS X 10.7 Lion, works fine!

These instructions are for setting up a mac to use connect.c to get SSH through a SOCKS proxy. If you are not using OS X this may still be of some use to you because connect.c will compile on Windows and *nix as well. If you’re in the NUIM oncampus accommodation and are having problems SSHing this could be the answer to your problems!

The first step is to get a copy of connect.c and compile it. The website contains instructions for doing this on other platforms but for the mac use:

gcc connect.c -o connect -lresolv

This will spool out a ream of warnings but don’t worry about that.

Then you have to copy this to a folder in the path and set up the correct permissions:

sudo cp connect /usr/bin
sudo chmod 555 /usr/bin/connect
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/connect

At this stage connect.c is installed, you now need to tell SSH to use this proxy for any servers you want to connect to that is outside the campus.

To do this you need to add lines of this form to ~/.ssh/config:

Host xxx.yyy.com
  ProxyCommand connect -a none -S socks.yyy.com %h %p

The example above is for connection to xxx.yyy.com, you’ll need pairs like this for each host you want to connect to. You should separate the pairs with a bank line.

That’s it, you can now ssh as normal and ssh will use the SOCKS proxy.

ssh [email protected]

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