socks

Dynamic Web Proxy Configuration with Firefox and SSH

In my day-to-day life I need to access a number of different intranet web services. Some of these are on my local work intranet, but I also need to be able to get to things like temporary services hosted on Grid’5000. These websites are not available on the public Internet so the standard procedure is to connect to a gateway that sits at the edge of the intranet and route traffic through that gateway using either a VPN or SSH socks proxy. This solution isn’t ideal, as it requires setting up the connection and possibly reconfiguring my browser whenever I want to access a site on one of these intranets. I can’t access work and Grid’5000 systems at the same time, and, when traffic is being routed through Grid’5000, I can’t access sites on the public Internet (this was a big problem when trying to troubleshoot a web application with my teammates by screen sharing over Google Hangouts).