First off, shout out to SSH and Putty, two extremely powerfull tools. To surf the internet without being detected by the internet police at your work you will need the following:

  • Home Linux machine running a SSH daemon.
  • putty
  • Need to be able to connect to your linux machine at home ( maybe through your work’s public internet proxy) while at work, through putty.
  • portable FireFox http://www.portableapps.com/
  • Home linux machine needs proxy configuration script.

First connect to your machine at home, if needed enter proxy:

proxy settings

Second, set up tunnel:

  • right click on upper left corner of putty window that is connected to your home box.
  • click “Change Settings…”
  • click Connection –> Tunnels
  • enter 1081 in Source port
  • enter localhost:80 in Destination
  • Click Add
  • Click Apply

tunnel settings

Third, setup FireFox to use the tunnel setup in step two:

  • double click PortableFireFox.exe
  • select Tools –> Options
  • click Connection Settings
  • Select Manual Proxy Configuration
  • In HTTP Proxy: enter localhost port 1081

FireFox Settings

Fourth, configure linux machine to forward traffic on localhost to public internet:

  • On Fedora Core 4,
    vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/proxy.conf
  • Paste proxy.conf code contributed to me by lazy dawg everlast http://little.xmtp.net/

    #turning ProxyRequests on and allowing proxying from all may allow
    #spammers to use your proxy to send email.

    ProxyRequests On

    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    #Allow from .your_domain.com
    Allow from 127.0.0.1

All done! Now you can go to anysite with out your boss’s knowlege!! it is all encrypted surfing too!  not much time was spent on this, so yeah……