Proxy Firefox through a SSH tunnel

Have you ever wanted to visit sites during the day from a location that denied access to those sites? What you need is the ability to create a secure and encrypted ssh connection to tunnel your browser traffic through. If you have access to a remote machine by way of ssh, you can set up Firefox to visit these sites.

The following method is only tested on Windows XP, with cygwin installed.

LOCAL_PORT: localhost port for ssh tunnel

SERVER_NAME: remote machine

1. set up firefox proxy

• preferences --> advanced --> network --> settings
• choose SOCKS v5
• manual proxy configurations:
• SOCKS 
• Host: 127.0.0.1:LOCAL_PORT
• No Proxy for: localhost, 127.0.0.1
• leave the rest of entries BLANK

2. set up firefox DNS

• open "about:config" page in Firefox
• search "network.proxy.socks_remote_dns", set the value to "true"

3. establish ssh tunnel

   ssh -C2qTnN -D LOCAL_PORT username@SERVER_NAME