This is just a quick post about a nice little tool I found that
allows you to setup and save your SSH tunnels and then quickly bring
them up when required. Why might you want to do this? Well theres
plenty of reasons. They range from it feels geeky, to you're paranoid
about those kids in the coffee shop with the "Hack Naked" stickers on
there laptops, to just because you can.
Now this guide does assume that you have a SSH server that you can get too and its running Privoxy on port 8118.
The tool is Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager (gSTM) and is available from http://gstm.sourceforge.net the repositories.
apt-get install gstmNow, a quick reminder of the manual way:
ssh -NL 8118:localhost:8118 synjunkie@ssh_server_ipaddressThen point your browsers proxy at localhost:8118
And now the pretty way.
Create The TunnelOpen
gSTM from Applications > Internet Menu, and enter your SSH server
details. Click Add to configure the port redirection settings and click
OK.
Save the settings by clicking OK.
Now you have a tunnel that is saved for you and can be started by Clicking on the Start Button.
Configure The BrowserNow
you need to tell Firefox to use your tunnel. Open Firefox Preferences
from the Edit menu in Firefox and amend the network proxy settings.
Now you can safely browse the web
You
could make this even more seamless by adding a Firefox extension to
allow you to have multiple proxy configurations set up and simply select
which one you want using drop down list on the toolbar. Switch Proxy
works well for this.
Check The TunnelYou
can test that your traffic is being tunneled by using Netstat,
Etherape, TCPDump or a number of other tools. Bellow I have used
Netstat.
I can see that I am making connections to local port 8118 and that the only external web traffic is going to my SSH server.