There are numerous articles describing tunnelling Samba over SSH with putty. In this post I will show you how to set up Samba tunnelling for everyday use without putty running all the time.

Things you need before you start:

An SSH server between you and the shares you want to connect to. It may be running on the same machine as the shares you want to access.

Also, File Sharing (Windows) or Samba (Linux) should be configured correctly on the machine you want to access. Make sure your firewall lets the SSH server connect to your Samba or Windows shares.

Step 1: Create a local loopback interface

We need to create a loopback interface on your local computer first. There is a lot of HOWTOs on the web describing this. I suggest you read this one. As soon as you have the loopback working and putting properly forwarding ports to the local loopback interface, go to step 2.

Step 2: Set up the tunnelling app

So you have the forwarding working now. Technically, that’s all you need. However, if you plan to use shares on a daily basis, there are a few things you will notice:

• It’s annoying to have the putty window open all the time,
• If you close it, your shares will become unavailable,
• If your network goes down for a while, putty won’t be able to reconnect your ssh session.

There’s a solution to these problems: a tunnelling tray application. Personally, I like myentunnel. It’s a simple wrapper for plink.exe from the putty package. Sitting quietly in the task-bar’s tray, it’s unobtrusive and reconnects automatically after a network failure.

Install and run myentunnel. Then set your hostname, username and password stuff in the Settings tab and go to the Tunnels tab. Add the Samba port and IPs in the Local box, press Save and then Connect. If putty connected and forwarded the ports properly, myentunnel should work without a hitch too.

If you have multiple servers to connect to, you can create server profiles. Read the myentunnel documentation for details.

That’s all, enjoy.

Here is a little something for all of you Mac-lovers who use Windows. A quick and easy way to have Mac OS X mouse cursors on a PC running Windows 7, Vista or XP. Although personally I’m not a Mac person, one of the first things I do after installing a fresh copy of Windows is change the mouse pointers to the Mac OS X ones. Usually this means I have to download a zip of individual pointer icons and then manually assign them to the right cursors in the Control Panel, which is a bit annoying.Well, I don’t have to do this anymore. This morning I put together a nice and easy installer that does all that manual work for me. You can download the installer using the link below.

Download Mac OS X Cursors Easy Installer

Thanks to Shinde for uploading the cursors to Winmatrix.com

Paczkator is a small Windows utility I wrote for the company I’m currently working with. Its purpose is to simplify the process of sending multiple big images (usually scanned documents) by mail. It’s small, pretty fast and requires no configuration from the user.

Features:

• Small, free and easy to install and use
• Automatically finds any images in the folder specified and scales them down if they are too big
• Zips the folder, opens your email application (Outlook Express by default) and creates an attachment for you.
• Warns you if the compressed folder is too big to send by email
• It’s localised. Currently it speaks English and Polish
• No administrator privileges required to install and run
• No additional software required to work properly

Download Paczkator 0.8 now!

Paczkator is distributed under the GPL2 license, which means the program is FREE for both private and commercial use. You can also redistribute and modify it. If you do so, I would be grateful if you notified me.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or suggestions concerning Paczkator.

Version History:

• 0.8 – current release: added localisation, installer and fixed a few bugs
• 0.6 – improved image recognition and scaling procedures, a bug-fix release
• 0.5 – initial release