Facebook is down in Northern Europe
facebook.com
facebook.com
If anyone is interested in how this works, there are hundreds of things online that explain it, but here it is in a gist:
SSH to your server using the -D <port> flag, so in my case it's "ssh -D 8080 whalesalad.com"
At this point, you've got a local SOCKS proxy running on 127.0.0.1:8080. I typically use Chrome, so when doing proxied stuff I rely on Firefox as it can have it's own proxy settings.
In Firefox, open prefs and go to Advanced > Network > Settings... (For, 'Configure how Firefox should connect to the Internet')
Choose manual proxy config, SOCKS Host is 127.0.0.1 and port is 8080 (or whatever port you specify with your ssh -D command)
Save everything and visit something like ipchicken.com to confirm that your browser appears to be tunneling traffic through your server.
Voila! Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, everything works. My friend also used this while he was in China to access everything.
i <3 ssh
p.s. as I write this, 9:02AM in Sweden, FB is back.
If you want to do that on a more regular basis, I would recommend to set-up a program like MyEnTunnel (which is basically a UI for Putty) that maintains the ssh tunnel open.
And on top of that, if you install a firefox / Chrome extension such as foxyProxy there's no need to manually change the proxy configuration, but you can define patterns on a site basis (netflix, etc.)
You had a blog post on your old old old Wordpress blog about setting up an SSH tunnel[1]. Honestly, you're the person who first introduced me to the whole concepts, and who's site I would keep referring back to! Funny to see you posting on here about it.
[1]: Looks like it has been 'mirrored' on blogspot http://myhowtosandprojects.blogspot.com.au/2007/08/tunelling...
I'm actually quite happy about it. Tons of companies use their Facebook pages for marketing instead of driving traffic to the website they control. Similarly, almost everybody I know now communicate through Facebook only.
I hope this is a good lesson for them, and everybody can get back to distributed systems.