How to setup a SSH-based proxy

I needed to get access to MSN at work, which for corporate reasons had recently been blocked. I believe there’s no effective way to block access to certain services, even if you had the most advanced firewall; as long as the network has access to the Internet and it allows SSH traffic, you can get through.

So this is what I did in order to be able to get access to MSN at work:

I opened a SSH session to a server that is not restricted to connect to the MSN servers, using the -D switch, which according to the SSH’s man page “will make ssh act as a SOCKS server”.

ssh -D 12345 user@someserver.com

That’s it, you now only need to setup your MSN client to use a SOCKS proxy which is located at localhost serving on port 12345.

In case you want to share your proxy with more people just prepend the ip address of your machine and a colon, for example 10.0.0.69:123456, and others will be able to connect using your ip as the address of the SOCKS proxy.