So, I do helpdesk sorts of things at work these days. It’s a pretty good gig, but I do have to put up with one IT guy who’s kind of a roadblock sometimes.

See, I have a Mac and a PC on my desk, and I mostly use the Mac for things, if only because it has a much better monitor than the PC and I’m more comfortable, these days, with OSX.

Thing is, the IT guy in question really doesn’t like Macs, and though he can’t do anything about the fact that we have a lot in the building, he can make them inconvenient to use.

Case in point: our internal firewall blocks port 3389 for most machines. This is the port that Remote Desktop uses. It’s unblocked for my PC so I can do remote support from the PC, but the guy won’t unblock it for the Mac.

I asked him about this a couple of times early in my employment, and his reaction was, well, derisive at best.

I toyed with the idea of spoofing the PC’s MAC address on the Mac, but I rejected that as a little too directly confrontational.

On the other hand, I realized yesterday that port 22 is NOT blocked from the Mac, and from there it took me about 10 minutes to get Cygwin installed and an ssh proxy running on the PC, and a few more minutes to figure out how to make all requests to 3389 go out through the proxy (Since Remote Desktop Connection on the Mac doesn’t use the SOCKS proxy setting) and now I have remote desktop connectivity from the Mac and, well, life is good.