ESTABLISH SOCKS PROXY OVER SSH

Aug 31, 2016 learning SSH

If a remote sshd server has the following setup:

AllowTcpForwarding yes

and is connected to the Internet, one can ssh into it and use terminal browsers (w3m, lynx for example) to surf the web. A better way to do this is to forward local network request to the remove server through ssh connection. The command

$ ssh -fN -D 8925 remote.server

establishes a SOCKS proxy at localhost:8925, which delegates all kinds of network connections through the remote.server. Option f put ssh into background, N tells ssh not to start a remote shell at all. Change the port number to a one that won’t give you one of the following error messages:

bind: Operation not permitted

or

bind: Address already in use

This can be set permanently in ~/.ssh/config:

Host remote.server
DynamicForward localhost:8925

One can then set local applications to use this SOCKS proxy. Take firefox as an example, go to about:config and change the following settings:

The last one is used to toggle the use of SOCKS proxy. The others can be set permanently.

References:

• https://www.mikeash.com/ssh_socks.html
• http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/ssh-socks-and-curl/

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