SSH Tunneling with PuTTY and Firefox

SSH Tunneling

What is SSH Tunneling?

An SSH tunnel consists of an encrypted tunnel created through an SSH protocol connection. Users may set up SSH tunnels to tunnel unencrypted traffic over a network through an encrypted channel. This is SSH Tunneling.

Why use SSH Tunneling?

There are many reasons you may want to use SSH Tunneling. For example:

• No one will know which sites you visit.
• Any data you download, as long as the application supports it, is encrypted. (For eg: email clients and browsers).
• Your activities will be hidden from any potential malacious folk

Ok, so say I’m interested; What do I need to set this up?

This will work for any program that supports use of SOCKS v5 proxies. This includes:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird (Mozilla’s Email Client)
• … there are others, but these are what I have personally tested.

You will need:

• A browser, of course. Firefox is recommended
• PuTTY – a free SSH client
• And access to SSH on a remote server. This can be a dedicated server, or a VPS (Virtual Private Server); possibly even on a shared host, if they allow you to have SSH access, and they are Ok with this.

Before setting this up, to verify everything is running as it should; visit Free Surf City and take note of your IP before the setup, then visit it again once finished.

Ok, I’m interested – so how do I set it up?

The first thing you need to do, is find which port you need to use for SSH. It’s typically port 22 by default. You will also need the IP of the remote server you’ll be connecting to for the SSH Tunneling.

Next, you’ll need to download PuTTY. You can do so, here. Once you have that downloaded and installed, we can move on to setting up a tunnel.

Installed? Good. Now open PuTTY. It should look something like this:
 

 
Now, enter the IP of the remote server, in the “Host Name” input box, and enter the port number in the Port input box. Also make sure the button under “Connection Type” is set to SSH. Now, on the left, you should see a list (or tree) of different categories/options. You’ll need to click on the “Connection” category. Once there, click on the “Tunnels” category.

At this point, you’ll need to enter another port number, in the “Source Port” field. This SHOULD NOT be the same as the remote server, you can center a random number here. Try to make it 3-4 numbers, and not sequential (eg: 1234 is bad, 2918 is good). Next, click/select “Dynamic” below that, then click “Add”.

On the left side, again, now click on “Session”, then click “Save” to save your settings. Finally, click “Open” to start your connection to the remote SSH server. At this point, you’ll need to login. It will first ask you for your username, then password. If you’re not sure what to use here, ask your web host. Now minimize PuTTY.

Last Step
I’m going to show you how to do this on Firefox. For other applications, consult their support or documentation.

Open Firefox then go to “Tools” then “Options”. Now click on the “Advanced” tab, then the “Network” tab. Now click the “Settings” button. You should see the following:
 

 
At this point, click on “manual proxy configuration”. In the “SOCKS Host” field, enter “127.0.0.1″. For the “Port” field, type the random number you chose in PuTTY in the last step. Now check “SOCKS v5″ below that, click OK, then OK again.

That’s it for the SSH Tunneling, you’re ready to go However, there is one last step if you want to hide Firefox’s domain lookups. In the URL/Address bar type about:config (if you’re using Firefox 3, this will bring up a warning first – go ahead and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button).

In the “Filter” bar, enter network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and change it’s value to true (you do this by right clicking on “false”, then clicking on “Toggle”. Why do this? Like I mentioned earlier, this can keep people from knowing what sites you visit – instead of your computer doing DNS lookups, the remote machine will

That’s all there is to it! Enjoy.

You can download PuTTY here
You can download Firefox here

This article was written exclusively for Monsoon Domains by Secondversion