In the framework I'm working with I can monitor certain things on a website. This website can only be reached from within the network. If I'm at work I can simply use my favorite browser and navigate to this website. If I'm at home, that won't work. What I can do, is login onto an interactive machine with ssh, start firefox there and navigate to the website. That works, but needless to say it is super slow, due to X11 forwarding for graphics being so inefficient.
Can I tell my browser to somehow use this server, that I usually ssh into as a proxy or can I do some other ssh magic to tunnel my way from home to this website?
21 Answer
SSH supports forwarding TCP connections, and most decent SSH clients can use this both to forward individual host:ports (creating listeners on localhost) and to act as a SOCKS5 proxy that you can configure in a browser (works best in Firefox). The latter is usually named "dynamic forwarding".
With both OpenSSH and PuTTY's plink you can get a proxy listening at localhost:1080 like this:
ssh -D 1080 foo.example.comThe equivalent graphical PuTTY option is under Connection → SSH → Tunnels; enter e.g. 1080 as "Source port" and click "Add" before starting the connection.
(Make sure to configure the browser to use this as a SOCKS proxy, not HTTP proxy.)
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