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I'm currently travelling through Ghana, as the German readers of my blog know. For some reason, I can't access my server from this internet cafe, and my assumption is that my hoster or his carrier blocks some Ghanaian IP ranges, to prevent scam mails, which mostly originate in Nigeria and other West African countries.

But I still want to reach my server, to check my mail and write blog entries. Luckily, I could work around that barrier, using various holes in the setup here. The software on this computer does not allow me to access the start menu, but I still could download putty and start it from Firefoxes download list. First hole. I could then connect to my account at my university in Germany, so no firewall here. Second hole. Unfortunately, putty can not act as a SOCKS server as OpenSSH does, but luckily, there is usocksd, a small SOCKS server, installed on the university server. I then forwarded the local port 8080 to there using putty, and I could change the proxy settings of firefox to use that instead of the internet cafe's proxy. Third hole. Additional benefit: Encrypted browsing...