Need to surf securely at work, or on a public wifi? Here's the poor man's vpn. Using an OpenSSH connection to your host machine with the dynamic "-D" flag, you can create a SOCKS proxy for a web browser on another machine. On a Windows machine, you'll need to use Putty to get your ssh connection.
Here's the connection:
ssh -D port user@hostmachine
Once you connect via ssh to your host, configure Firefox to use the SOCKS proxy server. (Options>Advanced>Network>Connections)
For even more security, you can also configure Firefox to route all its DNS requests through the same tunnel. From Firefox's address bar, type "about:config" for "advanced" settings, then look for the key "network.proxy.socks_remote_dns" and set it to true by double-clicking. Done! All your surfing will tunnel through your host machine.
To verify that everything's working, point Firefox here to verify the IP address matches that of the host machine.
the itjerk 
Recent Comments