Software that I like (STIL): ssh

The command ssh is an indispensable tool to connect and work with account on local or remote computers. An excellent description of some ssh functionality is given in this blog by Matt Might. Some functionality from this blog is repeated here, and this blog may contain more information.

Creating a Proxy for Browsing

If you need to access a website, which is accessible only from an internal network, and you have a Linux account on a computer in that network you can do it by creating an ssh tunnel and temporarily configuring browser to use that tunnel. First, you can create the tunnel using command:

  ssh -D 8080 Ahost.inside.network

In this way you will login to Ahost and create a proxy tunnel from your local host through Ahost. You now need to instruct the browser to use the tunnel. For example in Firefox, you choose menu options:

 Edit -> Preferences -> Network proxy

and set "SOCKS Host" to 127.0.0.1 and port to 8080. You can also use different port number.

After finishing the session, you can disable proxy in the browser, and ssh logout from Ahost. This recipe is described in the blog by Matt Might with some more details regarding tunneling the DNS requests.

created: 2020-11-23, last update: 2020-12-03, me comments