create socks5 proxy using window-less openssh from cygwin

After half day’s work, my dad and I successfully revived a 7-year-old Toshiba Satellite 3000 S353 laptop, and he happily confiscated it as his travelling laptop. However, in considering that most online banks in China still require some IE activeX controls, he insisted that I replace the ArchLinux in it with WinXP, and since he has grown accustomed to the ssh tunnelling between his desktop and mine for him to browse all those news sites blocked by the GFW, he asked if I can do the same thing on the new windows.

So here’s the thing. We’ll need a cygwin environment, in particular its openssh, psmisc, run and any POSIX compliant shell (e.g., ash). Suppose the cygwin environment is installed in d:\cygwin, create ssh-proxy.bat batch script as follows:

    REM ssh-proxy.bat
    REM this will create a socks5 proxy at localhost:9999
    REM @echo off

    d:
    cd cygwin\bin

    REM give remote server two sec to close an already-open connection
    killall ssh && sleep 2

    REM use explicit invocation:
    REM run /bin/ssh -Nf -D9999 user_name@your.ssh.server
    REM or a `tunnel' profile in ~/.ssh/config:
    run /bin/ssh -Nf tunnel
  

and if you opt to use the ssh profile `tunnel’, put the following in ~/.ssh/config (windows absolute path d:\cygwin\home\USER\.ssh\config):

    # ~/.ssh/config
    Host tunnel
    HostName your.ssh.server
    User user_name
    Compression yes
    DynamicForward 9999
    # use pub-key auth for password-less connection. cf. SSH_CONFIG(5)
    #IdentityFile ~/.ssh/some_private_id_file
  

Now for each internet session, just run ssh-proxy.bat once when you need the proxy. The run command used in the batch script prevents the ssh command from creating a console window. It’s almost transparent for web browsing if you combine it with foxyproxy and Firefox.

As an afterthought, I probably could have done it with putty and AHK, suppose AHK can hide the putty window, but that’d take me sometime to learn the AHK syntax.