Thoughts and Ramblings

In setting up SSH into an Linux install in WSL2, I’ve found guides on how to do this setup. While most contain the similar steps for setting up SSH, they have very different mechanisms for making it start on boot, of which almost none work.

Setting up SSH

First I’ll assume you are running WSL2 and have installed a debian based linux within it.

1. Launch the WSL instance and inside it execute:

   sudo apt install openssh-server
   

2. Run ip addr show to get the IP address of this VM to be used later
3. Launch your favorite shell on the windows side and run:

   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”Open Port 2222 for WSL2” dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=2222
   netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 listenport=2222 connectaddress=172.23.129.80 connectport=22
   

   and substitute the IP address you obtained earlier for the connectaddress in the second line.
4. Execute netsh interface portproxy show v4tov4 to confirm it is set correctly (and you can run netsh int portproxy reset all to remove the entries if you need).

(A step or two may be missing above but this is the gist and I’m not trying to make a comprehensive guide for this part)

In “Starship Troopers” Heinlein proposed the idea that only citizens can vote and only those who served in the military can become citizens (no inheritance of citizenship). The idea is interesting in that voting is limited to only those with skin in the game (military service). While I read the novel many years ago, recently I considered an similar interesting thought experiment:

What if only tax payers can vote? Here, by “tax payers” I mean those who net pay money to the government. So if someone receives $4k from the government but pay only $3k in taxes, this person doesn’t qualify. But if this same person paid $5k in taxes, then they would. How would the US be different if this were the case?