General Info

What are the DynDNS Name Servers ?

General Info - General Info

The DynDNS name servers are ns1.dyndns.org through to ns5.dyndns.org.

Further information on DynDNS can be found here.

Slow Firefox Startup / Firefox Performance Tweaks

General Info - General Info

Below are 2 performance tweaks that should get your Firefox starting up and running just as it should be.

Defrag / Clean the Firefox SQLite Database

One way to increase the speed in which Firefox runs and opreates is to clean (Defrag) the Firefox SQLite Database.

To do this you need to :

   1. Goto "Tools | Error Console" within Firefox.
   2. Within the Code box enter the following : Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");
   3. Click Evaluate.

Firefox will appear to freeze shortly. Once complete your Firefox SQLite DB should be defragmented and the broswers performance improved.

Enable HTTP Pipelining

Normally when a browser makes a request to a web page it does so 1 at a time. HTTP Pipelining allows the browser to make several at once.
This of course can greatly increase you browsers performance.
In addition to this we will also change the amount of time Firefox takes to process information once it has been received.

Below are the required steps :

   1. Within your Firefox address bar type “about:config” and hit return.
   2. In the filter bar type "pipelining" and hit enter
   3. Change the following entries by right clicking on them and choosing Modify
          * Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
          * Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
          * Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 8 (anything higher will be ignored)    
   4. Right click in the empty white area within Firefox and select "New > Integer". Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to "0".

SSH Tunneling

General Info - General Info

In this article we will be covering SSH port forwarding also known as SSH tunneling.

As previously discussed in our previous article Proxing Web Traffic across a SSH Tunnel using SSH Dynamic Port Forwarding, SSH port forwarding (or tunneling) re-routes TCP/IP connections through an established SSH connection. Being encapsulated within SSH provides security benefits along with the ability to route traffic through firewalls using just port 22 (SSH).

Note : This article includes - Putty Commands (Windows) / SSH Commands (Linux)  

Forwarding your local port to a remote address

This allows you to forward you local port to a remote address.

C:\Documents and Settings\admin> putty -L 7777:[Local Server IP]:5900 [Remote Server IP]

[root@linux]# ssh  -L 7777:[Local Server IP]:5900 [Remote Server IP]

Forwarding a remote port to your local address

This allows you to forward a remote port to your localhost.

C:\Documents and Settings\admin> putty -R 7777:127.0.0.1:3389 [remote server ip]

[root@linux]# ssh -R 7777:127.0.0.1:3389 [remote server ip]

Proxing Web Traffic across a SSH Tunnel using SSH Dynamic Port Forwarding

General Info - General Info

SSH port forwarding (or tunneling) re-routes TCP/IP connections through an established SSH connection. Being encapsulated within SSH provides security benefits along with the ability to route traffic through firewalls using just port 22 (SSH).

In this example we will proxy our web traffic via our remote server across an established SSH connection.
This is achieved by using Dynamic Port Forwarding on our localhost.

Dynamic port forwarding allows an ssh client to run a SOCKS proxy on localhost, which allows the forwarding of any port to any internet server through the remote ssh server. It looks a bit like this:

1. Client machine sends a HTTP request to the localhost SOCKS proxy (SSH Client).
2. The SSH Client then forwards the request to the remote SSH host.
3. The Remote SSH host forwards request to the appropriate server.

This example is based on our web browser being Firefox on a Windows based system. We will also being using putty as the SSH Client on our localhost.

Steps

1. On your client run the command within your command prompt - putty -D 8080 [remote server ip]
2. Configure you Firefox Proxy settings. Go into "Tools | Options | Network | Setting". And configure it as per below.

3. Goto the site www.whatismyipaddress.com and confirm that your connection is working via your Remote Server.