SSH Tunneling

Hi,
Today we'll have a look at what you can do by using SSH tunneling, for example if you have access to a customers firewall with SSH and want to see if you can surf the web from the firewall itself. This can be useful to check if you have a good internet connection from the firewall.

On your machine, make an SSH connection to your remote firewall with the following options:
ssh -D 0.0.0.0:5200 -p 22 root@remotehost.org 

The -D option starts the SOCKS proxy listener, listening on your interface on port 5200 (which is just a random port).
The other options make the tunnel to your remote firewall.
We'll connect to port 22 as root on ip "remotehost.org".

Now you can configure Firefox to start using the SOCKS v5 proxy option, you need to change the listening port to 5200!

If you now surf to http://www.whatismyip.com/ and you'll see that you are now surfing from the IP of the remote firewall! All HTTP and HTTPS traffic is now encrypted using the SSH tunnel.

Now you can do a speedtest, to see if surfing the web is as slow as the customer is telling you!

Hope you enjoyed this!

Kind regards,
Matthew