Chrome ssh tunnel forwarding

Question

I am first logging into an ssh server. Then I am trying to use Chrome for ssh tunnel forwarding. Is there a gui way of doing this? I can do this in Firefox's gui in like 10 seconds so I would think Chrome would also have this useful feature. Is there an easier way to do this?

Linux
/usr/bin/chromium-browser --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:3145"

Windows
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:3145"

I found this by reading these two links.

• chrome socks proxy through ssh forwarding timeouts
• Issue 38207 - chromium - SSH -D proxy tunnel fails chrome linux

Answer 1

If you want to use a remote ssh server as a SOCKS5 proxy with Chromium, it is as easy as:

ssh -ND 1080 remote_server

• -N: don't run a command: just make redirections/proxies
• -D: set up a proxy server on local port 1080

Other possibilities:

• -f: would fork immediately after successfully logging in and setting up the redirections
• -C: would activate compression, which makes sense over slow or expensive (mobile, GPRS/3g/LTE) links.

and then:

chromium-browser --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:1080"

Remember to close every chromium windows first. Otherwise the proxy effect will not have any effect.

You might want to install the package "autossh" so that the connection is automatically reestablished upon disconnections. In this case, for sure you want to set up public key authentication so that you do not need to enter your password every time.

1080 is the standard port for a SOCKS server. Using standards helps other programmers understand and maintain your setups.