I have a home PC running Ubuntu 12.10.
In order to make sure that my data isn't being monitored in public, I had in the past used a subscription VPN service.
I decided to research alternatives and I found out that OpenSSH makes it fairly easy to create a SOCKS proxy which can be used with Firefox and PuTTy.
After much trial and error, I finally have a server that I can connect to remotely and use BASH commands in. (I had to use port 80 for the SSH server as a lot of the places blocked traffic through the "usual ports" such as 22.)
The real issue came when I tried to use this as a proxy.
I used PuTTy and went to the SSH Tunnels section and added a Dynamic Forwarded Port and set the port to 80. I then went into Firefox and selected SOCKS v5, 127.0.0.1 as the IP Address, and the port as 80. This seemed to work perfectly and a "whats my ip" Google query returned the correct home IP address -- but then it stopped working.
The shell itself continued to work and I used it to reset the home SSH server to no avail. I have absolutely no clue what it is going wrong and any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
If you need any further information I will be happy to provide it.
