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Meerkat: simplified SSH tunneling

by Brett Terpstra Jun 2nd 2008 at 9:30PM

I would wager that most of the people who know they need an SSH tunnel also know the Terminal commands to make it happen. But if those people happen to be Mac users, it's quite likely they wouldn't be averse to having menu bar access, Growl integration, Bonjour capability and a nice GUI to handle their tunnels. And to those who just know they want secure browsing, email and other network activities but aren't SSH ninjas, such things might be even more attractive.

Code Sorcery Workshop's Meerkat is a handy application that provides all of the above tools and offers setup wizards to provide the right settings for the particular tunnel you need. It turns setting up a quick SOCKS proxy for web browsing into a 2 minute task. Setting up a tunnel for Mail is just as simple. Whether you're already using tunnels or looking to get some protection while browsing at the coffeehouse, Meerkat may be able to help out.

You can try Meerkat out for free with a time-limited demo. If it should become something you can't (or don't want to) live without, you can register it for $19.95.

Thanks, Mark!



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I would wager that most of the people who know they need an SSH tunnel also know the Terminal commands to make it happen. But if those...
 

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Pepe

Smartly written post and useful/non-bashing/non-juvenile replies. Thank you. I still don't know what SSH does and probably don't need it but thank you for the great post. This is a good TUAW piece work, in my opinion.

June 02 2008 at 11:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Pepe's comment
Aron Trimble

If you have one mac at home at home and another one somewhere else such as a briefcase, office desk, etc. then chances are you could use SSH!

SSH can:
- Encrypt all of your web browsing so the prying eyes of big brother at work or hackers at Starbucks can't see what you're doing
- Wrap a connection in encryption so you can control a home mac without fear that people will see your "stuff"
- Securely mount a remote drive or folder to your local Finder so you can place and retrieve files without being in front of the computer (think .Mac but free)

All in all it is very powerful, unfortunately you have to know what you're doing. It seems Meerkat makes it simple so you don't have to know what you're doing.

Very exciting product, I could see someone like my dad using this as he tends to shy from the command-line.

June 03 2008 at 10:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Arsei

I prefer the completely free and menuling based SSHKeychain: http://www.sshkeychain.org/
Elegant, simple and easy to use.

June 02 2008 at 11:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Arsei's comment
Christopher Gillespie

SSHKeychain is not quite the same program.

I use the older, non-universal SSH Tunnel Manager. (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/). Free and has worked for years.

June 03 2008 at 8:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adam

There's also Shimo (http://www.nexumoja.org/projects/Shimo/) in this space that works quite well for SSH tunnels, and further provides a slick interface to a bunch of VPN wares including Cisco's dark sorcery and your standard IPSec tunnel. His prices are in Euro-bucks, but it's roughly equivalent in price to Meerkat.

June 02 2008 at 10:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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