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?

Solution

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.

Comments

[user1686]

Use ssh -fN ... to make it drop into background after connecting.

[aresnick]

Awesome; thanks! How can I use this to expose that publicly? I'm not exactly clear on how I would set up a webserver to receive a request (say, on 80), forward it to the SSH tunnel, and pass the response back.

[aresnick]

So what I'd like to do is something like: [browser]---[my webserver]---[ssh tunnel]---[proxy on remote machine]---[remote web server (whatever resource the user requests]

[aresnick]

To finish that comment: it's not clear to me how to do that =)

[sybreon]

In that case, your webserver would need to function as a reverse proxy with an upstream proxy configuration. You might be able to do it with some squid magic but I have a feeling that you will need to write your own server.