The Glass is Too Big - Home

This is highly situational, but might be of help to someone going through the same problem, so I'm writing up a quick note, as much for my own reference as anything.

1. You're using (or want to use) Intellisync from Yahoo to sync your calendar with your Yahoo account. This is to get appointments from a client-specific Outlook calendar onto a consolidated calendar.
   
   
2. Said client-site blocks all yahoo.com addresses via a locked down IE setup, so you can't change the system proxy.
   
   
3. Administrator agrees that my use is legit, but won't unblock Yahoo.
   
   
4. SSH port is open.
   
   

Normally, in that situation, I would just use Putty to open an SSH tunnel and set up a dynamic port (usually 1080) that serves as a SOCKS5 proxy. This works for Firefox, Thunderbird and nearly every app I've ever needed to use it on. However, Yahoo's Intellisync doesn't like it.

So, instead, I set up a Squid proxy server on my home office LAN, and, instead of a dynamic port, I have Putty forward port 3128 to the Squid proxy machine. Then, I have Intellisync point to 127.0.0.1 and port 3128. This works.

Apparently, Intellisync can work only with straight HTTP proxies and not SOCKS5 proxies. So, if you set up a local HTTP proxy (which Squid is) via SSH, you can connect to Yahoo and the calendar appointments are now in sync.

All is right with the world. Both of you who needed this information can now rest easy.

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