SSL Tunnels - can I use it for browsing to circumvent firewalls?

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

Here is my problem, I am often in China and can’t access pages like facebook.com, youtube.com and other very common pages.

Is there a way that I can configure webmin so I can browse pages via my VPS?

My idea is something like this page > http://www.pimpmyip.org > but those public pages won’t last long and will get into the China block list very soon.

2

If you have SSH on your local system, you can set it up to act as a SOCKS proxy, which would allow you to browse the Internet using your server as a proxy.

There’s a number of howto’s regarding that throughout the Net – search on “openssh socks proxy” brought this blog entry up first:

http://bityard.blogspot.com/2009/01/make-openssh-socks-proxy.html

3

Actually in the end I just followed this:

http://www.devdaily.com/unix/edu/putty-ssh-tunnel-firefox-socks-proxy/

I just had to open a Putty connection and set the proxy in my browser to 127.0.0.1 with the right port.

Really easy!