Connection established!

It took a while, but I've been able to breach the proxy, finally.  All it took was some disguising (via SSL encryption) of the outgoing packets, sending the packets through the HTTPS port, and figuring out a way to do NTLM authentication manually.  With all that being said, it took a bunch of tools, some setup, and whole lot of reading.  The end result is a successful encrypted connection to an external SSH server.

I plan on posting a more detailed guide on how to do this in a later post as I currently have to run to make it to a prior commitment.

Boredom begins

A looming project deadline in my group has seemingly rid everyone of the responsibility to give me some sort of direction.  Since I'm not not currently involved in the aforementioned project, I am a bit stuck reading over massive amounts of specifications, fiddling with code and tools in the repository, and struggling to find something productive to do.  I guess it's a nice change from always having multiple things to work on and having to prioritize my time carefully.

Several hours were spent trying to forward various traffic through the company web proxy, which mostly resulted in failure and valuable learning experience.  Looks like the best solution is running an HTTP proxy remotely and having the corporate one route all traffic through that.  Speaking of which, this gives me something to do before I go to sleep.  Adiós.

Rules are meant to be broken

After spending some more time getting acclimatized to the office and having some pleasant, albeit, seemingly, subject-less conversations I managed to take care of more administrative matters and familiarize myself with the ongoing projects further.  In the afternoon, the curiosity got the better of me and I started poking around the network setup at the office in order to see what kind of coverage I could get for the Champs League El Classico only to discover the restrictions imposed on WAN access are worse than I thought.  Besides blocking freeware/shareware (Putty website is blocked!), the proxies block several common protocols, encrypted traffic, and some random websites that came up on Google's search results.

I had a chance to start working my way around the proxies only to find I couldn't manually authenticate with any of them.  This was disappointing and I will continue to try and get through, however, even SSH-ing to the outside world is, well, impossible, without authentication with the proxy, so simply routing the traffic properly is insufficient.

First day

After a couple hours of HR briefing about code of conduct, complete surrender of creative rights (the company wants a piece of everything you invent on their time) and a ton of legal paperwork I finally got to my work place (which happened to be on a different campus) and began familiarizing myself with the new environment.  An immediate meeting served as a brief introduction to the main project on the horizon, as well as, acquaintance with most of my new colleagues.  It was interesting, and I enjoyed meeting my new coworkers.  Everyone seemed intelligent, alert, and well spirited.

Following that, I had some trouble getting on the organizational network used by the firm, but after some back and forth with a couple IT guys, we were able to get it sorted.  I like to think my administrative experience helped in precisely describing the problems I was experiencing which resulted in speedy corrections.

Summing up the first few hours of this new work, I guess I have to say that I hope I don't soon lose motivation in the projects and problems offered, as the rigor of this industry will probably seem mind numbing before long.

The precursor

Last day of before it begins.  Just finishing up the last of a research article before I venture on to this journey.  I wonder if I complain about my pains with LaTeX tomorrow, will anyone know what I'm talking about?  Or is everyone using M$ Word out there?

Well, either way, it's a change of scenery, and so far I've been keeping with my regular fitness schedule despite now officially being part of the full-time work force.  That's half the battle, I had previously imagined...