Linux Administration Cookbook

Using SSH to create a SOCKS Proxy

SSH is great.

I never get tired of talking about how great it is, and it would be remiss of me to not mention one of its best features: the ability to quickly and easily set up a SOCKS proxy.

In the previous sections, we forwarded individual ports, but what if we were using a bastion host to connect to a slew of different websites within a network? Would you like to add tens of lines to your SSH config file? Or manually type out each port and mapping every time?

I didn't think so.

That's where the -D flag comes in.

See -D [bind_address:]port in the SSH manual page (https://man.openbsd.org/ssh):

Specifies a local "dynamic" application-level port forwarding. This works by allocating a socket to listen to port ...