Busting Out of Your Firewall with SOCKS

Most people find themselves accessing the internet from somewhere besides their home, and often times there are restrictions on the network that disable some protocols, or maybe block some websites you’d like to see.  An easy way to get around this is to forward your web session over an ssh session.  This can be done in any OS… the only requirement being that you have an ssh server setup outside of the network you are currently on.  The port I’ve chosen (8080) is arbitrary – you can choose anything above 1024.

Windows

Download putty, and type the name of your ssh server in the Host Name field.  Now select (Under “Category:”) Connection/SSH/Tunnels.

Putty SSH port forwardingUnder source port, enter “8080″ and select “Dynamic” under that.  Next, hit “Add”, which should add “D8080″ under “Forwarded Ports”.  Now hit open, and login to your machine.

Finally, you need to setup Firefox to go through your proxy.  Go to: Tools/Options/Advanced/Network/Settings…

Firefox network settingsEnter “localhost” under the SOCKS Host and “8080″ under the Port.  Make sure that SOCKS v5 is selected under that.

Hit “Ok” a couple times to get out of your configuration windows, and you’re good to go!

Linux/Mac

Now things are a little simpler under Linux/Mac.  All you need is ssh.  Simply type in terminal:
ssh -D8080 username@host.com

And set your browser’s proxy settings like we did above for Windows.

Further Reading

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