Proxy Firefox through a SSH tunnel
Have you ever wanted to visit sites during the day from a location that denied access to those sites? What you need is the ability to create a secure and encrypted ssh connection to tunnel your browser traffic through. If you have access to a remote machine by way of ssh, you can set up Firefox to visit these sites.
The following method is only tested on Windows XP, with cygwin installed.
LOCAL_PORT: localhost port for ssh tunnel
SERVER_NAME: remote machine
- set up firefox proxy
- preferences –> advanced –> network –> settings
- choose SOCKS v5
- manual proxy configurations: SOCKS
- Host: 127.0.0.1:LOCAL_PORT
- No Proxy for: localhost, 127.0.0.1
- leave the rest of entries BLANK
- set up firefox DNS
- open “about:config” page in Firefox
- search “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns”, set the value to “true”
- establish ssh tunnel
ssh -C2qTnN -D LOCAL_PORT username@SERVER_NAME