The problem:
Start opera, then load a ton of stuff at the same time. (your 25 tabs that have to be restored for instance). What happened was that after loading a few pages
partially, the rest would completely stall.

After some cursing I found out that it only happened when I used my squid proxy. (you know, to filter out ads because they slow the stuff down).
First I figured it must be squid. Then I realized that it would be weird, since nothing really changed. Maybe the blocklist? Nope, all looked fine.

Apparently Opera only uses a limited amount of connections to the proxy, so when a few of those requests are slow (you know, because google analytics takes 6 years to get through) the requests stack up and completely halt the process. Brilliant.

Finally I found the solution in some obscure configuration panel. Look for Enable HTTP 1.1 for proxy and make sure it’s enabled. Thanks for messing that up for me opera!
Oh well, now it’s fast again. phew.

So Opera doesn’t suck^Wsocks, huh.
However, since I personally don’t like Firefox enough to recommend people using it over Opera, we’ll have to get socks support using an external program. There are several options for doing this. Bascially what we need is some method to catch the calls to the socket system call and converts them to go through the socks proxy. My expert google skills have found me 3 solutions:

• Tsocks
• Proxychains
• Kernel Socks Bouncer

From this list TSocks sounds like the easiest one, even though it hasn’t been updated in _years_. Means either it works or it’s impossible to get to work these days . Anyway, slackbuild didn’t have any issues building me a tsocks package. Let’s see if it works!
First we create a little tsocks.conf file:

This tells tsocks that we want to access the proxy for everything that isn’t in our LAN (192.168.1.0/24) using a server on 127.0.0.1 on port 1234. It’s picky about the whitespace around the ‘=’ in the config though, don’t forget them. Now we have to enable tsocks, either by running the application by using the tsocks wrapper script, or by letting tsocks put itself in the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. I chose the latter:

*BZZZT* WRONG! That’s strike 1 for being an ancient (not updated for more than 5 years) piece of junk. I’m running a 64 bit OS, that means the library is inside /usr/lib64. Fine, we patch it:

If you’re getting errors about that /usr/lib/libtsocks.so not being found, unset your LD_PRELOAD variable
Good, time for a test!

It works! In order to make Opera use it simply start it like that:

NEXT! ProxyChains
“Q: Why use it in the first place? Tsocks works!”
A: Because it’s always good to have more than 1 tool available to use. Because its latest version is not 7 years old (only 2 *cough*). Because it has other features. Because it’s fun to test shit

Chalk down another success for slackbuild. Next, the configuration file. /etc/proxychains.conf is automagically installed, so we only have to adapt it if we choose to. The default config should work for tor, but we want it for my SSH proxy. I changed the default proxy at the end of the file to be ‘socks5 127.0.0.1 1234′. Note that it has the cool features to use several proxies (hence the name I suppose) in a chain (randomly if wanted) and also to proxy DNS. Anyway, the test (after unsettings the LD_PRELOAD variable!):

Cool, another working solution. Note how it proxied the DNS request for us. Also I find this one easier to use than tsocks.

Finally there’s this Kernel Socks Bouncer module, but it’s too much of a hassle for me to run kernel modules for a simple socks proxy. Let me know if it’s great if you used it
Thanks for reading folks!

Do they have a cute little firewall at your work that only allows outgoing traffic on a certain port? Does some site have retarded IP restrictions? Does the piratebay block you from home?
Have no fear, ssh is slow as a bear. (huh?)

Anyway, you could use an anonymous proxy to get around all of this, but they are often slow and hard to find. Not only that, they often require you to use a specific port.
So the simple solution for all this: use ssh. Of course this requires you to have ssh access on a machine outside of the network that you’re trying to get out of.
But if you don’t even have that, you probably suck anyway. (get lost with your micro~s fail piece of cardboard).

Solution #1, for simple TCP port forwards. For instance when you’re trying to access a remote snmp server that has the irc port (6667 by default) firewalled:

After a successful login you can now connect an IRC program to localhost on port 1234 and it will act as if you were connecting to the remote machine directly. (bypassing the firewall).
Woei. Too bad this fails for UDP though. You also need to keep the ssh connection open, but that’s pretty obvious.

Solution #2, for a real proxy solution. When you’re trying to access a remote web server it becomes more annoying to use a simple port forward, since your browser will not pass the correct
information to the remote server. (It will say Host: 127.0.0.1 for where it was supposed to be Host: www.piratebay.org for example).
To make this work we simply turn ssh into a socks proxy like this:

Now you can enter localhost and port 1234 in your browser’s proxy configuration in the SOCKS proxy section. Magic, you can now go to any site and it will be tunneled through the nicely encrypted ssh session. (although it might be a bit slower).

Well, so much for the obvious stuff today.