Re: Help! My ISP blocks repo.or.cz. How to push changes? (a solution)

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 14, 2009, 13:55 UTC
Message-ID: <200901141455.23935.jnareb@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <200901130043.04772.jnareb@gmail.com>

Jakub Narebski wrote:

> The ISP I use (Telekomunikacja Polska S.A., aka TP) made some
> unannounced changes for ADSL service (Neostrada) which made it block
> repo.or.cz (and of course its aliases, including git.or.cz where git
> wiki resides).

Thank you all for your help with arriving at solution. I'll describe it below; perhaps it would help somebody else (now that it is in mailing list archive).

First, let me explain what I am working with:

I have access to shell account with set up SSH key access; let's name this machine host.example.com. I don't have admin rights there, and quota is quite tight; I have installed netcat (nc) in ~/bin - it is only 22 kB.

I don't know where to find SOCKS5 proxy, and I don't have 'tsocks' installed either on my computer, or on shell account... I think.

Now, solutions:

1. For reading gitweb at repo.or.cz, and for reading and editing git 
   wiki at http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/ I use one of free HTTP proxies:
   http://www.4proxy.de (first such proxy I have found that has an
   option to _not_ obfuscate URLs; it still unnecessary escapes some
   things like '/' in the query argument).

2. For pushing changes to repo.or.cz I use SSH tunnel (I could have
   used ProxyCommand solution with netcat instead[1]). I run:

   $ autossh -M 2000 -f -N -L 2222:repo.or.cz:22 jnareb@host.example.com

   at startup, and I have set the following in ~/.ssh/config:

   # TP S.A. blocks repo.or.cz
   Host repo.or.cz
   	#ssh -f -N -L 2222:repo.or.cz:22 host.example.com
   	NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost yes
   	HostName localhost
   	Port 2222

   [1] Alternate solution:

   # TP S.A. blocks repo.or.cz
   Host repo.or.cz
	ProxyCommand ssh host.example.com exec /home/jnareb/bin/nc %h %p

3. For fetching changes via git:// protocol from repo.or.cz I use the
   following setup in git config:

   [core]
   	gitProxy = ssh-proxy for "repo.or.cz"

   Unfortunately example from Documentation/config.txt with "ssh" as
   git proxy command doesn't work, and neither putting command with
   options (e.g. "ssh host.example.com /home/jnareb/bin/nc") doesn't
   work: the command is _not_ split on whitespace. So I had to use
   helper script ~/bin/ssh-proxy:

   #!/bin/sh

   ssh host.example.com /home/jnareb/bin/nc "$1" "$2"

I hope that would help somebody... and if somebody notices better solution, hs/she would provide me with it :-)

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland