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Comment by wscott | Hacker News Reader

I use sshuttle (https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle). It is super flexible and works as a poor man's VPN.

It also has much better performance when used over a flaky connection because it doesn't do TCP-over-TCP.

It doesn't really create a persistent tunnel like this thingy, but it seems worth mentioning to people who might find autossh interesting.

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Actually, that looks like a tool that could be used in conjuction with autossh. sshuttle provides data transport, autossh provides connection persistence. Thanks for the heads-up, this could be a useful tool for me :)

Alternately, "ssh -D 1080 user@host" will give you a SOCKS proxy on 127.0.0.1:1080 that forwards all connections out of the remote host. No download required.

Yes, though a plain SSH connection is likely to close periodically. AutoSSH is meant to prevent that.

this is easily solved by wrapping it in a "while true;". Still no download required.

Yes this works fine for most cases. Although I've had DNS-related problems I've never been able to resolve properly.

Can you expand on that? I've never seen any problems with -D

Well the DNS queries aren't routed through the proxy.

Possibly because DNS queries are trying to be UDP?

That does TCP-over-TCP, though, which provides worse performance.

No it doesn't. SOCKS is connection- (stream) based, not packet-based.

I use this every day and the performance is not that bad. You wouldn't notice the difference when browsing the web.

Sshuttle is awesome. Comparing the ease of use to openvpn, it's night and day..

Indeed I was looking to create a VPN and found it complicated - saw sshuttle and found it awesomely easy (blog post about it http://alicious.com/cheap-vpn-using-sshuttle/ [has aff links in post]). My commandline was:

    sshuttle –dns -rv root@128.199.xxx.xxx 0/0 –exclude 192.168.0.0/9 # start sshuttle

-dns routes dns requests over the link

-rv remote server details (v for verbose output)

-exclude to not send traffic from local addresses over the link (not sure if this is required)

I wrote a guide on using Softener VPN which I found much easier to use than other VPN software:

http://www.selectedintelligence.com/post/128701492804/softet...

Our prototype used autossh actually but later we needed something a bit easier to manage. Disclaimer: I am not a networking or security expert.

I've found performance (bandwidth) on sshuttle to be poorer than OpenVPN.

It's definitely below what you get with a true VPN, but it's a great option when combined with an SSH server listening on port 443 to get any kind of "VPN" on a locked down network (like most airport WiFi, for example).

Too bad that Android blocks you from installing real Linux apps.

Not if you are rooted. If you want to get really crazy you can even boot up a whole Debian image.

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