A breakthrough in my long-running quest to reach Google Calendar via CalDAV through SOCKS from behind a firewall! If that’s a mouthful the solution is equally contrived, but quite worth it… for me.
The problem: iCal, Apple’s calendar client, is capable of connecting to Google Calendar via CalDAV (support for CalDAV was recently added by Google) but incapable of using the SOCKS/proxy settings in Mac OS X. Huh? Well, that’s Apple engineering for you.
The solution, for the unfaint of heart, assuming your SOCKS proxy is achieved using SSH:
Step 1
Tunnel port 443 (HTTPS) on your desktop to 443 on www.google.com:
ssh -D .... -L 443:www.google.com:443 ....
Step 2
Configure iCal. Fire it up, bring up Preferences, click on “+” under Accounts. Fill out as below, replacing your Google or Google Apps email address for “myemailaddress@gmail.com”:
Clicking on Create will cause iCal to whine about not finding the server or calendars. Ignore that and click again to proceed to the next screen:
The full Server Path (obscured above) is: /calendar/dav/myemailaddress@gmail.com/user/ (the email address, as mentioned earlier, should be replaced with yours).
And that’s it.
