Disclaimer: You may brick your fancy new Linksys router by following the advice in this blog entry. A large number of folks have installed this software successfully including me. But consider yourself warned in case you’re the unlucky one.
I use SSH a lot. My wife and nephew love streaming video like Hulu instead of regular cable. For the last few years there’s been a cold war simmering. I’m working late, they start streaming, and my SSH session to my server …

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Well the title says it all. Internet routers live at Layer 3 [the Network Layer] of the OSI model which I’ve included to the left. HTTP and HTTPS live at Layer 7 (Application layer) of the OSI model, although some may argue HTTPS lives at Layer 6.
So how is it that Layer 3 devices like routers treat HTTPS traffic differently?
Because HTTPS servers set the DF or Do Not Fragment IP flag on packets and regular HTTP servers do not.
This matters …

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I’ve spent the last 5 days agonizing over a very hard problem on my network. Using curl, LWP::UserAgent, openssl, wget or any other SSL client, I’d see connections either timeout or hang halfway through the transfer. Everything else works fine including secure protocols like SSH and TLS. In fact inbound SSL connections work great too. It’s just when I connect to an external SSL host that it hiccups.
If you remember your OSI model, SSL is well above layer 3 (IP …

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It took me a while to find this – I needed it for testing purposes, nothing malicious. If you’d like your web server somewhere on the web to pretend to be any other web server, even a secure one, you can do the following. x.x.x.x is your own server and y.y.y.y is the ip of the server you’re trying to mirror. I’m also assuming you only have one network card in the machine and it’s called eth0. The following will …

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