So I’ve gone back to Linux from Mac, due to the SSD issues I had with my Macbook Pro basically making VMware unusable. A Win7 VM would grind the guest and host to a halt on the 7200 RPM SATA OEM drive, and the SSD wouldn’t work, so I put the SSD back in my HP and installed CentOS 6 x86_64. Not really ideal, but at least it works.

CentOS 6 ships with Firefox 3.6.9, which is really old by now. Fine for a server, but I wanted FF6. I grabbed the Firefox 6.0.1 bz2 from VoxCast, unzipped it and copied it to /usr/lib64/firefox-6. Then I ran yum remove firefox to remove 3.6.9 and avoid any issues. I tried the instructions from my older post on this subject but for whatever reason it didn’t work – I’m guessing because I’m not using the distro’s Firefox RPM.

I followed these instructions to get the Flash 11 64-bit plugin installed. It still wasn’t working though.

I ended up creating a symlink:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /home/evan/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

When I started up Firefox after creating the symlink, Flash worked.

Additionally, to set Firefox 6 as the default browser, run gnome-default-applications-properties, select Custom, and paste /usr/lib64/firefox-6/firefox %s in the Command: field.

Update: I upgraded my home desktop PC from FC12 to FC14 last night and used the above procedure to install Firefox 6.0.2 on it with Flash 11. So, in case anyone was wondering, the above works for Fedora as well.

I once worked at this place where I got a stern talking-to for viewing non-work-related pages. It was around Christmas and I was doing my shopping online (since I left the house at 7 AM and got home at 8 PM). It’s not like I was farting around all the time. Anyway, the idea that I was being proactively watched by someone with an axe to grind pissed me off, so I decided I wouldn’t give him anything to read.

I don’t have that problem anymore, but I do frequently connect to open wifi points where my traffic can be viewed. I use SSL for things like email, but why even let them see that I’ve gone to nytimes.com?

My solution to both problems was the same: on my Linux box at home, run a proxy server, and pipe all my traffic to it via an SSH tunnel.

Step 1: Install Squid

Since I use CentOS, to do this I just did a yum install squid

Step 2: Configure Squid

Well, the default squid config (/etc/squid/squid.conf) was pretty much fine, although I needed to add an ACL clause so I could actually use the proxy. The LAN in my house is 192.168.1.0/24, so I put these lines in my squid.conf:

acl subnet_192 src 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
http_access allow subnet_192

Then start Squid.

Step 3:Create the SSH tunnel

I run Linux, so that’s the syntax I can provide (You can use putty to do this from a Windows machine):
ssh -f evan@public-hostname-of-proxy-server -L 3128:private-ip-of-proxy-server.com:3128 -N
This opens an SSH connection from your local machine (port 3128) to the remote server’s private IP on port 3128 (3128 being the default port on which squid listens). So connections to localhost:3128 will be forwarded over the SSH tunnel to port 3128 on the other machine’s private IP.

Step 4: Set your browser to point to localhost:3128 as proxy server

Well, that’s pretty self-explanatory. In the browser’s options (lots of other apps support HTTP proxies as well – AIM, etc), find the section about proxy settings and set the HTTP and HTTPS proxies to “localhost” and port 3128.

That’s it. To test if it’s working, try going to geoiptool.com and confirm that it shows you as coming from the home machine’s IP.

If you have a strict network admin who’s locked down outbound SSH, you can just have sshd listen on port 80 or 443, which almost everyone allows. A really nosy admin may notice encrypted traffic going to the server and kill it, but… well, I never said it was foolproof.

Updated 8/31/2011 See my newer post on this subject.

I know I’ve been through this before because I’ve setup Fedora before and it’s working. But I just installed FC12 on my desktop at home (since my Seagate drive bricked itself a few days ago and I had to reinstall anyway) and while I finally got the Adobe Flash plugin working, it didn’t have any audio, which made YouTube kind of suck. Anyway, this of course was a solved problem, I just forgot where the fix was located… but duh, it’s on the Fedora website. A simple

yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
    nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 \
    libcurl.i686

and everything appears to be fine. Thank you Fedora!

I’m giddy! I found this post on mozdev.org which was magical.

[evan@ehoffman ~]$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_17"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode)

[root@ehoffman plugins]# uname -a
Linux ehoffman 2.6.30.8-64.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 25 04:43:32 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@ehoffman plugins]# pwd
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
[root@ehoffman plugins]# ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_16/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

The main thing I was missing was that the plugin isn’t libpluginjava_oji.so, or whatever I thought it was, but libnpjp2.so. Once I created the symlink into /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins it worked (as verified on http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml and http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp).

That’s all it takes to get the Sun Java plugin working in Firefox on Linux.