SSH Proxy

These instructions written by Iain Murray (thanks!) may help you with setting up an SSH Proxy for remotely accessing University or School of Informatics web sites from outside of the University (which would otherwise require you to use a VPN).

You can use a browser on your own home machine, but make websites think you are coming from a machine that you can ssh into (i.e., remote.ssh).

First ssh into the remote machine from a command-line on your home machine, with any options you normally use, but with an extra "-D 8080" option:

    ssh -D 8080 remote.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk

Then configure your browser to use the Socks v5 proxy that ssh has set up on localhost port 8080. In Firefox:

  1. Near the top right of firefox click the menu button (☰)
  2. Click preferences
  3. type "proxy" in the box for searching settings
  4. Set a Socks 5 proxy using localhost port 8080

I use FoxyProxy to let me change the proxy settings more quickly.

In Chrome you can try the above instructions too (the menu button is three dots, then pick settings), but it's system dependent what you'll see. You can also try the command-line switch:

    --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:8080"

But I haven't tested this.

This more advanced detail may be necessary for some pages:

To ensure you fool the remote webpage and can access local-only hostnames, Firefox can tunnel DNS queries through the proxy. Once only, in about:config set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to True.

I haven't used Chrome for this, but I see DNS tunneling also needs some fiddling: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/network-stack/socks-proxy.

Last reviewed: 
08/03/2023