Poor man's VPN over SSH¶

FZU account required

This uses the institute SSH server limba.fzu.cz, so you need an FZU institute account (your main e-mail username and Kerberos password), not just a Phoebe account.

Using traffic tunneling over a SOCKS tunnel, especially through SSH, offers several benefits, like security, encryption and posibility to access services available from FZU internal networks only.

To configure Firefox to tunnel traffic over a SOCKS tunnel created by SSH, you can follow these steps:

Create an SSH tunnel¶

Open a terminal or command prompt on your local machine and use the following command to create an SSH tunnel with dynamic port forwarding:

ssh -D 1080 user@limba.fzu.cz

Replace user with your main (email) institute username, log in with your Kerberos password.

Configure Firefox¶

Open Firefox and follow these steps:

Open the preferences¶

On Windows and Linux, click on the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner, then select "Options."
On macOS, click on "Firefox" in the menu bar, then select "Preferences."

Go to network settings¶

In the Preferences/Options page, select "General" on the left sidebar, scroll down to the "Network Settings" section.

Configure proxy settings¶

Click on the "Settings..." button next to "Connection."
In the Connection Settings window, choose the "Manual proxy configuration" option

Enter the SOCKS host¶

In the "SOCKS Host" field, enter localhost as the host and 1080 as the port (or the port you specified in the SSH command).

Select SOCKS v5¶

Choose "SOCKS v5" as the type of proxy.

Configure "No proxy for"¶

You may want to add localhost, 127.0.0.1 to the "No Proxy for" field to prevent the SSH tunnel itself from being proxied.

Click OK¶

Click "OK" to save the changes and close the Connection Settings window.