Browsing the web through TotalRC

Sometimes full-fledged tunneling can be an overkill. Typical example: You need to check your yahoo email from work but your employer blocks mail.yahoo.com. In this case by using Totalrc tunneling you can "socksify" or "proxyfy" the browser and read your yahoo mail. As an experiment we decided to offer another solution. You point your browser to http://www.totalrc.net/browser.html and type your url in the url box. We will retrieve your html content and send it to you. Give it a try, it works with many sites. Some useful sites, like www.hotmail.com don't work with it yet, probably because they use a lot of javascript. We will post a note as soon as we make some progress.

How we use our own software

Totalrc.net is a small company. We develop and sell tunneling software as well as provide tunneling service. We also provide software consulting services. In the latter role we often face various restrictions by corporate firewalls designed to protect employees from accessing internet protocols, other than http and from accessing certain web sites. I want to share some tips and tricks on how we use our tunneling service. They may be helpful to our users as well.

1. Some sites are blocked, typically useful sites such as yahoo mail or hotmail.
We use the following setup: use Internet Explorer without any modifications to access intranet and allowed sites. To access blocked sites we use Mozilla FireFox browser, configured to use Socks proxy, port 1080, all other proxy entries are left blank. This way traffic to blocked sites is tunneled through our gateway and typically goes through, intranet sites, frequently optimized for IE, are accessed without any problems, and, there is no reconfiguration involved. FireFox works very well with Socks proxy.
2. Remote control software clients, particularly VNC is blocked.
To access remote computer running VNC agent(TightVNC, UltraVNC, etc.) we use Port Mapper in socks2http: 5900->[computer ip address]:5900 TCP
Then all you need to do is to point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1
3. Instant Messengers are blocked.
We typically use Trillian IM client specifying socks proxy 127.0.0.1, port 1080 for all IM plugins: MSN, Yahoo, AIM