Monthly Archives: June 2008

Mary Gardiner answered one of Voytek Eymont’s questions on the SLUG list by referring to the ssh socks proxying post on Ubuntu Blog. I was already familiar with ssh socks proxying, but that page has a good set of comments and links. A summary of that post, plus some other notes:

• setup via $ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server, configure web browser socks 5 host (not http proxy) to localhost:9999 (On Firefox: Preferences, Advanced, Network, Settings, Manual, SOCKS Host. FoxyProxy really helps with this – you can setup wildcards to send certain URLs via certain proxies eg for when connecting via a VPN to work)
• http proxying can be setup at the command line (for use by wget, apt, etc) with the http_proxy environment variable. For example export http_proxy=’http://user:password@1.2.3.4:3128/’; cmd1; cmd2; export http_proxy=”
• configure apt to use a proxy via /etc/apt/apt.conf by using Acquire::http::Proxy “http://username:password@proxyserver:port/”; See Using apt-get behind a proxy.
• there’s also corkscrew (preferred), connect.c, and proxychains to secure other traffic or setup tunnels automagically in ~/.ssh/config. For example:

% sudo aptitude install corkscrew

% cat ~/.ssh/config
Host foo.bar.com
    User me
    Port 443
    ProxyCommand corkscrew 1.2.3.4 8080 %h %p ~/.ssh/proxyauth

% cat ~/.ssh/proxyauth
username:password

• Transparent Multi-hop SSH – using ProxyCommand and netcat to automate double ssh hops (also, my SLUG question)
• non socks-ifiable programs can use socks via tsocks. This is really handy for getting apt to work – remember ssh is acting as a socks proxy and not as an http proxy. For example sudo tsocks aptitude install foo
  
• lots of good tunnelling ideas on the Tor Wiki HOWTO and How to tunnel everything through ssh
• also secure your dns traffic by setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true in Firefox’s about:config
• cvs + socks using connect.c (similar to my post on svn over an ssh tunnel)
• another similar article Secure your Wi-Fi traffic using FOSS utilities

Jan/2011:

• the FoxyProxy website has some good tutorials, and links to other material
• Linux Magazine has an article called Tunnelling Data
• PaulDotCom – SSH gymnastics with proxychains

export http_proxy='http://219.93.2.113:3128/'