Many journal articles are not freely available, but require some kind of Drexel subscription. Usually, they will seem free when you connect from a Drexel IP address, but when you connect from home you have to go through the whole rigmarole with Drexel Library's SFX doodad to get your article. What a pain. I had previously SSH tunneled my X server out to newton, and fired up Firefox on newton. Not much better, since tunneling Firefox is slow. w3m is faster, but without good JavaScript support a lot of “modern” sites leave you without much functionality. I discovered a neat solution courtesy of Carthik.

You can get around the drag of forwarding X from newton, and just forward the webpages directly by setting up a SOCKS proxy with SSH. This is done in a number of possible ways through SSH, but the following two lines are the most common. If you want to simply carry the connection through without a shell opening:

$ ssh -fND localhost:9999 you@newton.physics.drexel.edu

if you want to open a tunnel and a shell at the same time, you could run:

$ ssh -D localhost:9999 you@newton.physics.drexel.edu

Now port 9999 on your computer takes you to a SOCKS proxy on Newton. Open Firefox on your home computer and set it up to use the proxy with

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings -> Manual Proxy Configuration

And enter localhost and 9999 in the SOCKS Host fields. Click OK and you're done.

For bonus points, you can also make your DNS queries from Newton by entering

about:config

in Firefox's URL field, and setting

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

to true.

If you're tunneling your DNS queries, you can also use this method to access services otherwise screened by intervening firewalls. For example, I can log in from home to check the status of our lab's chemical inventory, but the only port our router needs to expose to incoming connections is for SSH.