Ssh – More efficient X-forwarding

I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but you can use ssh -D4545 domain.com to open a socks proxy tunnel at port 4545 to the desired machine from your computer.

You can then set up that proxy in your application (say Firefox) and use a plugin to quickly engage and disengage the proxy settings (something like TorButton).

There is one drawback though: when your target host has more than one network device, you cannot control which one will your data take to leave the machine you're tunneling to.

This can be circumvented by installing a normal proxy server on that machine, routing the traffic from, say, localhost:3128 to the desired network interface, and then doing a ssh -L4545:localhost:3128 and pointing all applications to 4545 that ought to use the proxy.

This gives you greater control on the proxy side, as the integrated proxy of SSH is not really configurable.

You don't need to open tunneled ports on the firewall. You are fine opening only the SSH port.

You may be getting caught by one of a few problems.

• The local ports may already be in use. Try using netstat to see if the port is occupied.
• When you connect to the tunneled port you will find it a localhost (127.0.0.1) not the remote address. Some software may not like this.
• Tunneling can be turned off in the server. In that case your tunnels won't work.
• If you are tunneling to another host (remote.ip.address is not on the host you are tunneling through), you may be blocked by the SSH server's AllowTcpForwarding setting.
• If you are tunneling to a port on the same host (remote.ip.address is 127.0.0.1, or some other IP on the server) you are tunneling to the destination software may not like it. For example, some VNC servers default to preventing same host connections to prevent looping conditions.

Try connecting with the debug flag enabled.