Proxy servers in my college has made my life like a living hell. Blocking IRC and SSH is the worst thing that you can do to a developer I suppose. For past few years I have been trying to totally eliminate the problems associated with proxy, but was never successful. My previous attempt was to create a ssh tunnel using a amazon-ec2 instance and create a socks proxy to be used by applications. The configuration was like below:
Host amazon
User ubuntu
HostName 54.214.39.19
Port 443
ProxyCommand corkscrew <proxy-address> <port> %h %p
IdentityFile /home/maxking/.ssh/my.pem
Localforward 6667 irc.freenode.net:6667
LocalForward 9930 imap.gmail.com:993
The above configuration coupled with autossh creates a socks proxy tunneling
all the data trough the ssh tunnel. A simple command that you can use is
autossh -f -N -g -D 9999 amazon
This creates a socks proxy on localhost:9999 and tunnels all the request
trough the ssh tunnel created. Autossh helps to reconnect the ssh session
as soon as it breaks( which is very often behind my college proxy ).
Recently I came across another solution for this which made my life more easier, sshuttle. It is a “Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man’s VPN. Forwards over ssh. Doesn’t require admin. Works with Linux and MacOS. Supports DNS tunneling.”
So with the above setup I just have to run
sudo sshuttle -r amazon 0/0 --dns -x 144.0.0.0 -x 10.0.0.0 -D
and all my requests without a proxy are forwarded over the tunnel and everything seems to just work.