March 29th, 2014 
Sully By Sully 3/29/14
So there you are. Your linux box is locked down in the middle of a firewall battlefield. Production is down because program alpha is broken. Support wants a log file sent in. The only ports you have open are specific to secure telnet and the broken service itself. A simple option, Python. Python is a simple and rich programming suite that also has some pretty powerful tools. Most Linux distributions come with it installed standard.
The command that I use most often as a support admin is python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9090. This will start a simple web serve on port 9090 that displays the folder it was started from. In this case /tmp/mydir.
You can use any port you like. In this example I stopped the application first because the port is already open on the firewall meaning no late night firewall admin call required. Simply load a web browser using https://serverip:9090 and download any file in the directory you need.
Control-C back in the Linux shell to kill python’s web server and you can get back to surfing.
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