I actually did not believe it’s this simple.

Creating the tunnel is as easy as typing:

Which can be improved with

See the man page on the details of the extra options.

This will open up port 1080 on your local machine, providing a SOCKS proxy (SOCKS5 if I’m right). You can then specify this in any application supporting SOCKS proxies. This includes Firefox and Chrome. With Firefox it’s straight-forward. You can find it in the usual proxy page in the settings.

For chrome it’s a bit more tricky. While you can specify a SOCKS proxy, it seems to ignore it. If you want to enable your tunnel, you have to run chrome with the following command-line flag:

(or use chrome. Whatever rocks your boat).

Once this is set up, what will happen is that your application/browser will send all requests to your locally running SSH instance. This in turn will forward it to the remote host, where the request will be sent out on the web. The response takes the inverse direction. As stated by linode, this is great if you’re on an untrustworthy network!

Sources:

• http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/SSH_Dynamic_Port_Forwarding
• man ssh

this week i’ve stumbled over the following video.

the video shows a presentation from Jason Fried from “37Signals” about how he runs his company.

as i’m working for a small internet service provider myself, i found this video very inspiring and a must-see for everybody in the business.

i think that there are a lot of very good points being made, like teleworking, focus on what matters, don’t waste your time on “david vs goliath” battles etc.

i recommend this video to everybody who owns or works for a small web-related company

Source: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1329-my-talk-at-the-business-of-software-conference-september-2008