How to Get Away With Chatting at Work

Do you ever need to urgently chat with someone while you're at work regarding some personal matters? And is your online internet chat application currently blocked by the company? There is still a way. Access the internet via SSH. Normally, there is an internet proxy server that is used at the workplace. This proxy server acts as a firewall. Based on some company rules, an employee may have limits on accessible sites. To verify this proxy server, open Internet Explorer (IE) browser. In the Tools menu, select Internet Options'. Go to Connections tab. At the lower portion (Local Area Network settings), click LAN Settings'. A new window opens up. Look at the details in the Proxy server portion. You will see that the 'Use a proxy sever for your LAN' is checked, an address and port are specified. Now what should be done is to make your chat site request go to a program that uses SSH. SSH is basically Secure SHell. It is a protocol that uses secure and encrypted connection between the server and client computers. Then that program will encrypt the requests before they're sent to the proxy server. In this way, the proxy server will not be able to detect the sites you're accessing. First, get the program that uses SSH from the internet. A common program would be PuTTY. Its site shouldn't be one of the blocked sites since this tool is versatile and is used by network people. Once you have this installed, you have to run it to start with the configuration. Upon running PuTTY, a window will appear showing the configuration. In the Category on the left side, select Session. On the right side, you will see the basic options for the session. Enter the host name or the IP address of the chat site. The protocol should be SSH and the port at 22. Go to the Category again and select Connection. Select SSH, and then pick Tunnels. On the right side, you will see the options for tunneling. At X11 forwarding portion, the X display location will be localhost:0. This will be your local computer. At the Port forwarding section, add a listening source port. Specify anything beyond 1023. Add a destination. This will be your internet proxy server and port as seen in the LAN Settings in your browser. Click Add. Then click Open. You now have PuTTY set up. The next step is to configure your IE browser. Go to the LAN Settings. At the Proxy server section, use 127.0.0.1 as the address and the port as the value specified in PuTTY as the source port. Click OK. Close your browser and open a new one. Your browser is now ready. Go to your chat site and you should be able to access it. To access some prohibited sites at the workplace, one must use SSH. Using PuTTY as a program that utilizes SSH, one would be able to access the restricted site in no time.

About the Author:

Peter Garant has written many articles about New Proxies for a recently launched website about Proxies. Visit How to Get Away With Chatting at Work.