I moved back to Lillington, N.C., in preparation of the Fall 2007 semester at Campbell Law yesterday. Today, I sought access to my files back home in Shelby, N.C. — something that I often do. Unfortunately, my IP address has changed here in Lillington, and I had previously restricted SSH access to the specific computer at home to the old IP address. To make things worse, I also restricted remote management of my router to the same IP address. I still had SSH access to a throwaway computer back home.

What to do; what to do?

My first thought was to SSH into the unrestricted Linux box at home and use Lynx, a text-based CLI browser. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. The router required Javascript, and my installation of Lynx wasn’t up to the task.

So, in the deep recesses of my brain came a solution:

ssh -X -l helix [IP address at home of unrestricted computer] firefox

The “X” switch on SSH tells SSH to redirect the output over the SSH connection when the remote command is run. Therefore, I opened an instance of Firefox on my remote, unrestricted Linux box. I then opened 192.168.0.1 — the local address of my router at home — in that instance of Firefox. I made the necessary changes to remote management, and while I was there, I opened up the restricted computer to the new IP address.

Linux is pretty nifty, eh?