Coupling together DC and SSH: Initial thoughts

DC has been the main medium for file sharing in my institute. Now the authorities have begun a covert operation to ban the DC and ADC protocols. As you can imagine, this will hit the student community really hard as DC is a medium we have relied upon since the inception of the institute network itself.

As the authorities tighten the noose around the 2 protocols, it is high time we did something about this.

The idea is to hide DC behind a protocol that they can never think of banning. One of the key protocols used at our institute is SSH. If we can use SSH such that the DC traffic converts to SSH traffic, then no one will ever be able to lay a hand on our beloved DC.

Now, we must understand that DC traffic cannot be restricted inside a single broadcast domain. The restriction comes from the routers, which filter off the packets pertaining to the DC and ADC protocols.

Now my initial thoughts are that we run DC inside a single broadcast domain, for example, the B.Tech 4th year lab, and then we provide an interface to each student implemented via SSH such that it feels that a person is running the DC application on his own machine.

In this case, there are 4 mechanisms relevant to us:

• GUI
• File Sharing
• File Uploading
• File Downloading

GUI will be taken care of by SSH, the rest has to be implemented. This requires a lot of knowledge on shell scripting, and will require hours of planning and coding. I am willing to do that. Any one else, if interested, is invited to join me in this endeavor. For the end of DC will surely mark a historic calamity in the history of IITG.