steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

OpenSSH is the reason I started to use BSD *nix - particularly FreeBSD (and now OpenBSD) - back in the days of my first experimentation with qmail. But, I never knew that using ssh with the -D switch allowed you to use the port forwarding mechanism as a SOCKS proxy... This is an example of link stumbling: I was on the road at the end of last week and I'm forcing myself to be more secure about my surfing habits and transmit most anything I do (i.e. email and web browsing) through my own servers. In order to do this, I had to set up a minimum of four tunnels for the traffic, one to my squid server, one to my smtp server and two to the two different mail servers I access. So, I remember seeing a program for OS X for which you could set up profiles to automatically start up x number of ssh tunnels (because I'm too lazy to write the script to do so myself) and I googled "os x set up ssh tunnels" and happened across Marc's Combining ipfw/natd and SSH Tunnels which then pointed me to SSH as a SOCKS Proxy. Sometimes it is truly amazing what one can stumble across. I was so excited to write about this (kind of a note to myself), that I still haven't found the program for which I started looking in the first place. OpenSSH really does rock... and by the way, next time read the friggin' man page! (note to self)