I used this to tunnel my traffic over SSH in high school. That allowed me to visit blocked websites like Reddit or YouTube. The school IT administrators had already blocked common VPN providers.
Yeah same with me in university. They eventually started rate-limiting each SSH connection to ~50kB/sec, so I ran a bunch of separate SSH connections, made them as upstreams on a tinyproxy - and then used proxychains to force apps to use that tinyproxy tunnel (a lot of apps back then didn't allow you to configure a proxy).
If you're already using SSH as the transport, what differentiates this from openssh's built-in "DynamicForward" SOCKS proxy?
It must work; my ISP blocks access to the URL.
(Choices are limited out here.)
For a more modern client, there is proxychains-ng. However, if I recall even that is sort of outdated and there are now better alternatives.
> better alternatives
Can you recommend any?
I don't recall what I've used, but I think it was something available in the Arch or Alpine repo. I typically try to avoid solutions that operate on the process, because detached processes may not actually use the proxy. Tinyproxy is one of my favorites for this. However, an alternative to proxychains-ng is tsocks. If you're looking for VPN solutions, then vopono is great.
Anyone using this daily? Could example a use case?
I've used this as a light weight way to send traffic from a cli app through TOR.
I use it to patch in network to User-NS-containers with a separate network namespace. Run danted on the host, then socat to a unix-domain-socket, bind mount that and then proxychains-ng.
We used this at work to connect into the VPN. It's very handy.