[CLUE-Tech] Advice sought: should I use SSH or not?

[Roger Frank]

On Wednesday 18 April 2001 10:20, you wrote:
> The basic answer is, if it's available, use it.  
>
> You can do a lot more than just telnet connections with ssh, you can
> use it to set up a VPN, pierce firewalls, encrypt X windows traffic...

Hmmm.  Pierce firewalls, you say?  I went to school today after setting up
ssh on my home system and promptly found that the firewall put up by
the school district would not let me make the connection to my fixed 
IP address with ssh.  Yet I can ping it.   I sent email to the Powers That Be
and they said it's policy and there are no exceptions.

In the interest of my further technical education, is there more
about firewalls and ssh, and is this related to IP tunneling in some way?
Not that I would actually want to pierce the school's firewall, of course.

Roger Frank

PS: On the Beowulf cluster, all the Debian (Progeny) machines came up
easily.  It was as easy as apt-get instal povray, apt-get install pvm for the
parallel virtual machine, and a few small supporting apt-gets and it was
a done deal.  We are struggling with the RPM equivalents, conflicts and
such, on the Mandrake machines.