OpenSSH SOCKS proxy support

Often, when you’re administering or developing on servers remotely, you may need to access resources that are not available to the public. There are several different ways that you can gain access to protected services from a remote location, including a VPN, port forwarding over SSH, and stunnel.

However, one method that is not as well known is OpenSSH’s SOCKS proxy option. Introduced in OpenSSH 3.7, SOCKS support allows you to easily tunnel traffic from any application that has support for a SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 proxy through your SSH connection. To do this, you simply need to add ‘-D <port>’ to your ssh connection string, where <port> is the port you would like your proxy to run on. Then, configure your application to use a proxy at localhost:<port>, and all of the traffic from that application will be tunneled through your SSH connection.

In addition to accessing protected resources, you can also use this for more everyday tasks – such as encrypting traffic sent over a public wireless connection.