SSH Tunnel

07 Jun 2006 · #techtalk

Let’s say your ISP blocks you from visiting certain websites. There are various ways of bypassing such restrictions. Here’s how I do it using SSH tunnels.

• Get a domain hosting account with ssh shell access from an overseas provider.
• It’s always great to setup key based authentication and ssh-agent. Here’s how.
• $ alias ssh-tunnel=’ssh -N -v -D 8080 mydomain.com’
• Run ssh-tunnel from a local shell.
• Install the SwitchProxy Firefox extension and configure it to use 127.0.0.1:8080 as a Socks v4 proxy.
• Test your setup. e.g., if you are in Singapore, try playboy.com ;-)
• Since we used the verbose (-v) flag, you should see connection information in the tunnel’s shell output.

Note: This does not provide anonymity! Use Tor or JAP for that!

The traffic over this tunnel will count towards the monthly bandwidth quota of your hosting provider. Since I get over one terabyte of monthly transfer with Dreamhost, I am not so concerned about this factor. :-)