How can I set up squid to act as a tunneling proxy to expose a VPN or SSH tunnel?

Question

I'd like to set up a tunneling proxy accessible by URL--so, to access bar.com through the tunneling proxy, you'd go to foo.com/bar.com and continue to browse bar.com transparently from there. I can either set up an SSH tunnel or a VPN connection that I'd like to expose. How can I set up squid (or another proxy server) to route requests through an SSH/VPN connection like this?

Answer 1

First, Setup your ssh tunnel

ssh you@yourproxysever -L8080:localhost:8080

Leave this connection running, this assumes that your proxy server is listening on port 8080.

Second, Setup your web browser to use localhost:8080 as its proxy server

The ssh tunnel will forward packets to your proxy server over ssh.

Answer 2

Not quite clear about what you need. But if you need to route web packets over SSH via a proxy, you can use SSH in SOCKS mode (-D) and use something like Privoxy in SOCKS mode to route it. So the connection would look like this:

[browser]---[privoxy proxy]---[ssh socks]---[remote machine]---[web server]

However, if you want to route traffic to a proxy via a SSH tunnel, you can use SSH in tunnel mode (-L) to route it something like this:

[browser]---[ssh tunnel]---[proxy on remote machine]---[web server]