Many thanks to all for replies. Stephen's suggestion proved the ticket, given my setup. To provide the steps in case others interested: 1) get the connection going by opening a terminal and issuing ssh -D 1080 (me)@(myserver).ca We use ssh keys already on this machine for doing cron-based backups, so this is very suitable to our machines. 2) On Firefox (for us, at least), go to Edit/Preferences/Advanced choose Network tab, then Settings under Connections. Activate 'Manual proxy', (default is "use System proxy settings"), and in SOCKS box put localhost with port 1080. Note: I put 1090 on my machine in both this and the ssh line above so I would avoid any collisions when Mary using the tunnel. Is that needed? A good or bad idea? I'm relatively ignorant of these aspects of the tunnelling approach. 3) Installed QuickProxy add-on to Firefox that allows a quick toggle of the proxy on and off. I first tried FoxyProxy but did not have much joy -- too complicated and not well-documented (i.e., in the Help) for quick setup in this case. However, others may want to comment. I like to exit the ssh proxy when done. Is that a good/bad/indifferent choice? Best, JN On 12/27/2010 12:05 PM, Stephen Gregory wrote: > On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 08:26:57PM -0500, Prof. John C Nash wrote: > >> I've a server in Canada and am thinking of trying privoxy or similar >> tunnel. Does anyone have experience or advice on use of privoxy or >> similar tools? > > If you are going to setup an internet accessible web proxy you need > one that supports authentication. Privoxy does not support any > authentication. A web proxy like squid does support authentication > but I recommend that you use ssh with the "DynamicForward" option to > create a socks tunnel. It is trivial to setup. > > Start the tunnel with: > > ssh -D 1080 server-in-canada > > Set the web browser proxy to use SOCKS V5 with localhost 1080 as the > SOCKS Host. > > Watch TVO. > > There is/was a firefox plugin that will give you a button to easily > turn the proxy settings on and off. > > If she is using that other OS the ssh client putty also supports > dynamic (SOCKS) tunnels. > >