Networking

The Proxy That SOCKS

A proxy could be either a necessity for an organization or a way to secure browsing or to bypass restrictions from firewalls and web filters. Whatever the use cases might be, the good thing is that there are simple ways to create a proxy of your own using SSH and SOCKS. This post describes how to setup a SOCKS proxy using a remote server as SSH host and some Firefox tweaks.

Source

I have read this some time ago from a fellow Slacker that it is possible to create a proxy using SSH. He describe the details in his post about Securely browsing the net – using SOCKS. The post is very straight-forward and he even explains the how and the why.

Steps

The steps to setup the proxy is broken down into these parts:

  1. Have a remote server (with public IP or domain) with SSH.
  2. On your client machine, open an SSH connection with some special tweaks.
  3. Modify your browser to use the proxy host and port and its DNS lookup behavior for maximum security.

For the first step, we open an SSH connection but with some special ports. Of course you must have an account on the remote server to be able to open an SSH session.

ssh -D 8888 lysender@darkstar.net

Once the session is setup, open your browser (Firefox or SeaMonkey or anything) and set the SOCKS proxy to the 127.0.0.1 host and 8888 port. As an additional anonymity we must modify the browsers behavior of DNS resolution where it should not contact the local DNS to resolve URLs.

On Firefox or SeaMonkey, open a new tab and go to about:config. Look for the following config entry.

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

Change the value from false to true.

Once you completed this all steps, you can now watch pr0n at work. Enjoy.

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