Damn Proxies - Rohit Yadav

It’s an unnecessary overhead to do a lot of things inside (http) proxies. For example you cannot use services such as git, ssh, email/smtp, ftp right away when the only allowed ports are 80 and 443. To use Github over HTTP proxy you may use corkscrew over HTTPS; just put something like the following in your ~/.ssh/config:

Host gh
User git
Hostname ssh.github.com
Port 443
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
ProxyCommand corkscrew 10.1.1.18 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/proxyauth

Put username:passwd in the ~/.ssh/proxyauth file. Now, simply use normal git cmds, such as:

git clone gh:rohityadav/recipes.git

In case you’re lucky and have access to a computer that has unrestricted Internet (maybe your personal VPS), use tunnelling and port forwarding over ssh to connect to a particular host; for example:

ssh -L 2080:cvmappi09.cern.ch:80 <username>@lxplus.cern.ch

ssh -p 2080 username@localhost

Or, surf Internet over a SOCKS proxy, for example:

ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 username@myserver -p 1123

How do you use it in a browser, say Firefox? In Firefox open about:config set the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns field to true and in proxy setting leave everything blank and put localhost as SOCKS host and whatever port (8080 in the example) you used.

Assuming you’ve a socks proxy like the one above, you can use proxychains to force any application to use that socks proxy by configuring /etc/proxychains.conf, and setting a suitable DNS server in /usr/lib/proxychains3/proxyresolv (default is 4.2.2.2). Now $ proxychains vlc on bash and listen to that awesome Internet radio station.

April 5, 2012

Damn Proxies Internet inside a proxy