I really hate using public wifi. I hate the fact that just anyone could look at my network traffic. Call me paranoid, but it’s true. This is why I usually use an ssh tunnel for most of my work while at coffee shops or at an untrusted place. I do this using
ssh -N -f -D 8080 my.secure.hostSo great, I have a local SOCKS proxy set up at my localhost now, but how do I use it? Firefox has proxy options, so that’s fine. I like a bit more control over it, so I use Foxy Proxy. Don’t forget when you do this to also forward your DNS queries through the proxy as well, otherwise a lot of this is going to be useless. You can do that in firefox with the about:config setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns.
So this did it for me for a while. I turned off my email syncing and went happily on my way browsing. But then one day I wanted to use wget to download a file and realized that its proxy settings don’t work well with SOCKS. I searched around but didn’t really find out if it could work, but stumbled on a program called tsocks.
tsocks runs whatever program you give it as an argument, with the addition of passing any network traffic it wants through a SOCKS proxy of your choosing. It reads the details of this from its configuration file. Just set your proxy to localhost, your port to whatever you used, in this case 8080, and make sure it knows what your local network is with its settings so you can access local computers too. An example file looks like this:
local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
local = 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0
server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = 8080 And that’s it! Now just run a command like wget with it:
tsocks wget http://my.important/fileAnd it’s done so using your awesome, encrypted proxy. No snooping or packet modification allowed!
Posted on 12 November 2011.