At work, they have set up the firewall so that they block all IM (instant messaging) and certain websites. I actually don’t mind them blocking out inappropriate websites so that certain images won’t get displayed on the screen. But they have also blocked other sites that I would like to get access to like Kuro5hin. And blocking IM seems a bit ridiculous.
So, I Googled on how to solve this problem and found a solution. The basic idea is to run a proxy on my computer at home and open a SSH tunnel from work to home.
To use IM, I followed this nice tutorial, AIM over SSH. It uses Dante as the SOCK proxy. I installed it and started it up by “/usr/local/sbin/sockd &”. Then on my computer at work, I started SSH:
ssh -L 1080:localhost:1080 -N [username]@[home_ip]
Then I configured Trillian to proxy through localhost:1080 using SOCKS5.
The Dante installation doesn’t create a script in /etc/init.d, but here is a script to put there to start it up automatically.
To use IE, I followed this tutorial, SSH+Squid Howto. I installed Squid and started it up by “/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid start”. Then locally I started another SSH tunnel:
ssh -L 3128:localhost:3128 -N [username]@[home_ip]
Then in IE, I configured the proxy to go to localhost:3128.
Now I have full IM and IE access at work. 🙂