When I want to access some of my home servers aways from home, I typically use an SSH connection rather than exposing multiple ports through my router. Most of my "home services" run as HTTP web servers, so I would use SSH port forwarding to access that server's IP and port on my internal network. As the numbers of those servers grew, maitaining a large list of port forwards, and remembering which local port connects to what remote IP and port was too difficult to manage. I didn't want to go down the route of setting up a personal VPN service, so was there something I do with SSH?
It just so happens that one of the port forwarding options supported by OpenSSH
(and other SSH clients like PuTTY) is the dynamic
port forwarding, with the -D option. This makes
SSH run a SOCKS proxy that can be used to forward any network
request, with no need to reserve a local port for each remote IP and port you want to access.
SOCKS is supported on most OS, though it is typically a system-wide setting. In my case, I'd rather set up a web browser to use my proxy only when I want it to, leaving the rest of my system's network intact. Also, the web browser can forward DNS requests through the proxy, which is useful if like me you have a custom DNS server at home.
Firefox has settings to make it use a SOCKS proxy, but you can also use the proxy-toggle extension to quickly turn on or off its use of your proxy. On Google Chrome, you can also use the more sophisticated extension Proxy SwitchyOmega, which also supports using the proxy only for certain domain names or IPs that would match yours on your home network.
On iOS, things are a bit more complicated. The Termius SSH client that I use on iOS supports dynamic proxies. For the SOCKS settings, you could build your own PAC file and expose it as a public HTTPS URL, but again this would also be system-wide and difficult to turn on and off whenever you open the SSH connection. My solution then is to use the venerable iCab web broswer, which not only supports SOCKS settings on its own that you can easily turn on and off, but also creating multiple profiles, each with its own proxy settings.
Published on May 20, 2019 at 14:59 EDT
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