Many journal articles are not freely available, but require some kind
of Drexel subscription.  Usually, they will seem free when you connect
from a Drexel IP address, but when you connect from home you have to
go through the whole rigmarole with Drexel Library's SFX doodad to get
your article.  What a pain.  I had previously [[SSH]]-tunneled my X
server out to newton, and fired up Firefox on newton.  Not much
better, since tunneling Firefox is *slow*.  [w3m][] is faster, but
without good JavaScript support a lot of “modern” sites leave you
without much functionality.  I discovered a neat solution courtesy of
[Carthik][].

You can get around the drag of forwarding X from newton, and just
forward the webpages directly by setting up a [SOCKS][] proxy with
[[SSH]].  This is done in a number of possible ways through SSH, but
the following two lines are the most common.  If you want to simply
carry the connection through without a shell opening:

    $ ssh -fND localhost:9999 you@newton.physics.drexel.edu

if you want to open a tunnel and a shell at the same time, you could run:

    $ ssh -D localhost:9999 you@newton.physics.drexel.edu

Now port 9999 on your computer takes you to a SOCKS proxy on Newton.
Open Firefox on your home computer and set it up to use the proxy with

    Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings -> Manual Proxy Configuration

And enter `localhost` and `9999` in the `SOCKS Host` fields.  Click
`OK` and you're done.

For bonus points, you can also make your DNS queries from Newton by
entering

    about:config

in Firefox's URL field, and setting

    network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

to `true`.

If you're tunneling your DNS queries, you can also use this method to
access services otherwise screened by intervening firewalls.  For
example, I can log in from home to check the status of our lab's
[[chemical inventory|ChemDB]], but the only port our router needs to
expose to incoming connections is for SSH.

[w3m]: http://w3m.sourceforge.net/
[Carthik]: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy-forwarding-secure-browsing/
[SOCKS]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS