You will probably want to use this technique if:

• Your firewall is preventing you from accessing what you need to access outside your network.
• You don’t have control over the firewall to open up the ports you need.
• You DO have access to an external server via ssh.
• The ssh daemon on the remote server has been configured to allow this or you can configure it yourself.  (GatewayPorts = yes)

I’ll just quickly go over the steps which will get you ready to run:

1. Install tsocks.
2. Configure tsocks.  My configuration looks like this:

   local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
   server = 127.0.0.1
   server_type = 4
   server_port = 1080
   
   Which means that for all local addresses, it will go directly over the LAN. However, for everything else, it will tunnel to 127.0.0.1:1080 over SOCKS version 4.

Now the only thing left is to create the SSH tunnel on a local port of 1080 (as configured in tsocks.conf) to your remote server:

bash#  ssh -D 1080  <username>@<server.com>

Leave that running. It’s your link to the outside world. Now open up another terminal and do whatever you need to do. In this example, we’ll start firefox:  (make sure your firefox isn’t already running so that it’s a complete restart.)

bash# source /usr/bin/tsocks on
bash# firefox

And…. that’s pretty much it.

Tsocks preload’s itself as a library and implements it’s own network operations. (connect,  etc..).   So it works like magic.