Connecting to SVN server behind corporate firewall from home

snicker picture snicker · Mar 3, 2010 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

How can I configure TortoiseSVN to connect to a SVN server behind a corporate firewall from home?

This is the question I'm having a hard time finding an answer to. Here's what I DON'T have:

  1. Official VPN access to the corporate intranet.
  2. Control over the SVN server.
  3. Any control over the intranet.
  4. Cooperation from the IT department.

Here's what I DO have:

  1. Full control over my computer at my desk at the office.
  2. Willpower

This is a shot at what I tried, and seem to be unsuccessful at (names of people and places and machines have been changed to protect the innocent):

Sweet network diagram of fail

  1. I am using Wippien to set up a zero configuration VPN from my home computer (NG-ATHOME) to my work computer at my desk. This works, I have total network access to and from both machines.
  2. I have OpenSSH for Windows running on NG-WORKBOX.
  3. I have PuTTY on NG-ATHOME connecting to NG-WORKBOX to tunnel dynamically over port 1080. The SOCKS proxy is working, as I can verify that with any web browser. I can confidently say that this is not the problem in the scenario.
  4. I am using TortoiseSVN on NG-ATHOME configured to use a proxy on 127.0.0.1:1080. When I try to hit "svn://NG-SOURCE/PonyRepository", I get error: cannot connect to host. I can ping NG-SOURCE fine.

Why doesn't SVN work?

Hmm, I have a suspicion that SVN does not like SOCKS. Anyone have a suggestion?

Answer

basszero picture basszero · Mar 3, 2010

Have you tried forwarding directly to port 3690 on the target machine instead of using socks?

ssh -L 3690:remote:3690
svn info svn://localhost/blahblahblah