Hacker News Reader

Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

This is the way: SOCKS5 via SSH

You do need some minimal technical understanding and some scripting.

Pick any cloud provider that can give you a VM with SSH access.

Read up on doing this on your local device or another device on your LAN:

    ssh -NT -g -D 10001 -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ConnectTimeout=5 -i your_ssh_private_key your_cloud_login@any_cloud_provider_ip

Change 10001 to whatever.

Now read up on how your browser points to a SOCKS5 proxy. For Firefox, I create a separate profile. For chromium based, I use the command line.

You are now virtually located to whatever region you chose for your VM.

I mentioned some scripting. It's simple enough that I have a /bin/sh script to spin up the VM, set up the SSH SOCKS5 proxy, launch the browser, then spin the VM down when the browser exits.

View on HN

> For Firefox, I create a separate profile.

Firefox supports per-container (and as such per-tab) SOCKS proxies, which I find really useful.

So useful, in fact, that I've come full circle and I am now running a userspace Wireguard to SOCKS proxy [1] in order to have that convenience for a VPN which does not have any host I could SSH to.

[1] https://github.com/whyvl/wireproxy

If you're using Tailscale you can install it on your Apple TV (if you also happen to have one of those devices).

Now you can use your home connection as a proxy through wireguard when traveling.

Tailscale is great, but by itself is the wrong tool for the task of routing traffic over some host only for a single browser tab (but to all destinations for that browser tab), as it seems to be "all or nothing" when it comes to using a remote exit node.

It's probably possible to set up a local SOCKS proxy that knows to use some Tailscale non-exit-node for egress, and to manually allow that traffic within Tailscale and on the remote node, but not out of the box as far as I can tell.

Installing a SOCKS proxy on the remote node, reachable only over Tailscale, would be an alternative, but that doesn't work on an Apple TV.

Major issue I faced in this method is the network egress costs the cloud providers charge. I had to remind myself not to accidentally land on YouTube or some other video streaming sites.

Are there any cloud providers who don’t charge for network egress?

Many! OVH has unmetered plans, for example.

> Major issue I faced in this method

Biggest issue regular user might find with this is that basically all the VPS host' IP ranges are known, and plenty of websites give you a different (worse) experience compared to when using residential addresses, or straight up block you.

Personally I found the hassle to great, compared to using existing VPN services.

Exact same experience here. In the 2010s I ran my own VPN exit node on a dirt cheap VPS so I could access streaming content in my country of birth. Worked great for years, but nowadays so many sites simply block non-residential IP ranges that I gave up ages ago now.

It's a shame because deploying WireGuard was a simple two command process: git checkout followed by a `docker compose up -d` for me etc on a fresh VPS instance.

Yes, but search for "VPS" instead of "Cloud". "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword used to make people pay 10x-500x more than they have to. Although VPS providers are catching on, and starting to label their VPS services as "cloud" now.

Has anyone benchmarked this against running e.g. Wireguard and how it is, performance wise? I'd expect Wireguard to be faster, but don't really know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com