On 2008-07-06, Magnus Warker <war
...@magnus.co> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am looking for a solution for an anonymizer problem. This is the
> situation:
[Protect machine on untrusted network using remote machine at home]
> My question: How can I realize this? I prefer open source software running
> on linux.
> The only proxy I know is squid. Can I use it in my scenario?
Just as a different solution, what I do is forgo the HTTP proxy
altogether and use the SOCKS forwarding feature of SSH instead.
As long as you have sshd running on your remote machine (the one in
your house, which is on a 'trusted' connection), and your travel
machine (the one you're using in the 'untrusted' network, like an
Internet cafe) has an SSH client -- available for basically every
platform -- you just open an SSH connection with the "-D {port}" flag,
and then point your browser at "localhost {port}", telling it to use a
SOCKS proxy.
This is in many ways a lot nicer than using an HTTP proxy. All web
traffic is forwarded from the browser to the port on the localhost,
and from there across the SSH tunnel to the remote machine, which
actually makes the connections for you.
It's dead simple to set up and works for web traffic, instant
messaging, and virtually any other application that can use a SOCKS
proxy (pretty much everything).
Googling "ssh socks forwarding" will turn up lots of HOWTOs for
various platforms. Here's just one, for Debian:
<http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/449>
I like this because it doesn't require installing or running anything
on your remote machine besides sshd, which chances are you're already
running as it is.
-Kadin.