Squid Proxy over SSH
Secure your web traffic from prying eyes—and improve performance in the process.
Squid
(http://www.squid-cache.org) is normally used
as an HTTP accelerator. It
is a large, well-managed, and full-featured caching HTTP proxy that
is finding its way into many commercial web platforms. Best of all,
squid is open source and freely available. Since
it performs all of its magic on a single TCP port, it is an ideal
candidate for use with an SSH tunnel. This not only helps to secure
your web
browser when using wireless networks, but also potentially makes your
browser run even faster.
First, choose a server on which to host your squid
cache. Typically, this will be a Linux or BSD machine on
your local wired network—although squid
also runs in Windows, under Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). You want to have a
fast connection to your cache, so choosing a squid
cache at the other end of a dial-up connection is probably
a bad idea (unless you enjoy simulating what the Internet was like in
1995). On a home network, this is typically the same machine you use
as a firewall or DNS server. Fortunately, squid
isn’t very demanding when it supports only a few
simultaneous users, so it can happily share a box that runs other
services.
It is beyond the scope of this hack to include full squid
installation instructions, but configuration isn’t especially difficult. Just be sure to check your access rules and set a password for the management interface. If you have trouble getting ...