BenV's notes

This tiny issue showed up a while ago, and I’m not quite sure when exactly it started. It sure was very annoying.

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.

Especially force, that’s what we need.
Because somehow Opera still hasn’t bothered to implement SOCKS proxy support. And if you would like to use… oh I don’t know… tor… or maybe simple ssh proxying support to test stuff from an external IP instead of from inside your local network, or for whatever your reason might be (working around your corperate firewall? ;))…. you have to use Firefox. Because they DO have SOCKS support. Strange. A case to bash Opera 🙂 (continue reading…)

This is trivial stuff, but nice to know.

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:

idiot@yourmachine$ ssh -L 1234:127.0.0.1:6667 ip.of.irc.machine
*username and password stuff*

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:

moron@yourmom$ ssh -D 1234 ip.remote.shell.machine
*username and password stuff*

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.