Tunelling even more stuff over SSH

Today at the CS department of the Technion is a particularily Bad Network Day (TM) for laptop users; none of the wired connections at the farm work, and wireless doesn’t seem to working for HTTP at all.

It does, however, work for SSH. Ka-ching! :)

Tunneling your browser over SSH is a pretty simple affair - SSH into somewhere which has a decent connection, and use the -D9999 flag (9999 works, but it can be any 16-bit number over 1024). Then, configure your browser to work over a SOCKS proxy at 127.0.0.1:9999.

How do you, however, get other things to work over that tunnel? There’s an excellent program called dante-client (that’s an apt package, folks. if you can’t apt-get due to your network situation, get it at packages.ubuntu.com or packages.debian.org). Install it, and make sure /etc/dante.conf has the following lines:

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route {
    from: 0.0.0.0/0   to: 0.0.0.0/0   via: 127.0.0.1 port = 9999
    protocol: tcp
    proxyprotocol: socks_v4 socks_v5
}

Then, run socksify whatever-you-want-to-do. For example, sudo socksify apt-get install something. Or perhaps socksify ssh somewhere. Or sudo wget something. Or socksify git do-something-awesome. (All of the above work for me)