Code Sorcery Releases Meerkat 1.0

Have you ever tried to set up an SSH tunnel? Chances are you either have no idea what that is, or you have tried, and are squirming in your seat now recalling the pain you suffered.

SSH tunneling is an extremely powerful means of establishing an encrypted (secure!) link between your computer and another computer, migrating selected network accesses from one computer to the other.

For instance, let’s say you’re a student, and you have a school library that provides all manner of online reference materials, such as encyclopedias, magazine indexes, etc. In order to prevent these resources from being accessed outside the school, the school may limit access to computers “inside the network.” If you have access to a shell account inside the network, you may be able to use SSH tunneling to “surf the web” from your shell account, even though you’re using Safari on your Mac to do all the web viewing. Nifty, huh?

I have configured something like this before and it’s extremely confusing and easy to get wrong.

Meerkat 1.0 from Code Sorcery Workshop, is a slick GUI interface around providing this type of functionality. It provides nifty luxuries such as named presets for tunnels, and allows for tunnels to be opened automatically when a particular app launches. Cool!

Congratulations to Justin Miller on reaching 1.0 with this product!