[kwlug-disc] SSH SOCKS proxy without SSH

[Paul Nijjar]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 01:40:15AM -0400, unsolicited wrote:
> You are talking about http proxies here. For your message, as given,
> ssh is a red herring.

Actually, no I'm not. 

I did some more research on my own. It looks like one right way to
have a SOCKS proxy without SSH is (wait for it) to install a SOCKS
proxy. There is a package called "dante-server" that can do this on
Debian. It looks like the magic port tunnelling with SSH is actually
an implementation of SOCKS. 

SOCKS differs from an HTTP proxy like Squid in that it is capable of
proxying all traffic. I am not sure whether I will need that
functionality, but it is possible. (For example, I may need DNS run
through the proxy.) 

The other aspect that makes my application different from Squid is
that Squid caches data, and I actually don't want to cache anything. I
just want to redirect traffic to go through my special machine. 

Lori's suggestion looks good too. I will have to investigate whether I
can get away with a small set of IP addresses for this application,
but I like the idea of putting all configuration in OpenVPN. 

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org