#ops stuff

I've already posted about using a ssh tunnel in order to pair with my coworkers while working remotely. Yesterday I decided to spend a little bit of time extending that system to also allow me to use a SOCKS proxy, so that I can browse securely even when working from a strange network.

How does that work? In a nutshell, I will create a secure connection to a trusted remote server, and then send all of my traffic through that server, which will act as a proxy. In this case I will use my personal web server that is hosted by Dreamhost as the secure proxy.

This is a feature that ssh supports out of the box. The following section in my ssh config file is responsible for setting up the proxy:

Host webproxy HostName example.host.com User my-username DynamicForward 8888 Compression yes RequestTTY force

The "DynamicForward" directive sets up a tunnel on localhost:8888.

I'm running Mac OS X Mountain Lion, so using the proxy is simple. Under "Network" I added a location called "Out," and under advanced settings for Proxy, specified a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888:

So at this point switching to secure network access is as simple as running "ssh webproxy" and setting my Location to "Out" in the Apple menu.