Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by gibs0ns on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @09:21PM (#29916026)

I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN. If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh [email protected] -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy. For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection.

Ofcourse this is only useful for a single user, and for devices that can use ssh and proxies.

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by qiqitori on Thursday January 13, 2022 @05:33AM (#29919138)

Just be careful with -D, as it is relatively easy to accidentally make it possible for other computers to use your computer as a proxy too. By default, GatewayPorts in the sshd config is set to 'no', which will prevent this from happening. However, you or someone else may have set this to 'yes' at some point for some purpose. To be safe even in that case, you may want to use 'ssh -D127.0.0.1:4444' instead of just '-D4444'.

I have accidentally opened an internal network to the public this way. (Nothing bad happened.)

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by forty on Thursday January 13, 2022 @02:55AM (#29917964)

I just want to mention sshuttle [1] which self describes as poor's man VPN and works well in my experience.

[1] https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by ShortStretto on Thursday January 13, 2022 @04:55AM (#29918884)

I've recently come across sshuttle and wondered if there was a Windows alternative, anyone know of one?

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by Wheaties466 on Thursday January 13, 2022 @10:47AM (#29921977)

proxifer works ridiculously well for me. Its not free though.

https://www.proxifier.com/

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by rkeene2 on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @10:00PM (#29916295)

That is a SOCKS5 proxy (as you said), however SSH can pass IP packets or Ethernet frames:

https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/ssh-ip-tunnel.txt.htm

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by anotherhue on Thursday January 13, 2022 @12:06AM (#29917079)

Doesn't this have all the usual TCP over TCP issues?

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by ajsnigrutin on Thursday January 13, 2022 @01:34AM (#29917505)

yep, fragmented packets and double confirmations, but if you're using it to order pills and read some US news, it doesn't really matter.

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by suifbwish on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @10:13PM (#29916372)

Haha I came here to say just that. Using NAT and routing you can setup the machine initiating the client ssh connection to act as an internet gateway for the clients that have its IP set as their gateway. Did this with a raspberry pi before.

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by adevx on Thursday January 13, 2022 @02:32AM (#29917855)

Easiest option in the book. The only downside I face with this is frequent captcha requests as the IP range (Hetzner/IPv6) is marked suspicious. Probably because it is flagged as a server range vs domestic.

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by axegon_ on Thursday January 13, 2022 @05:52AM (#29919280)

This is what I've always done should I face some blocking or whatever - spin up the lowest tier vm on gcp in whichever region suits me, do my business, kill and bury the vm.

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by daxuak on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @09:58PM (#29916280)

Second this. I haven't tried proxychains. iptables with redsocks[1] for redirection works pretty nice.

[1] https://github.com/darkk/redsocks

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Re:Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) by chinathrow on Thursday January 13, 2022 @07:19AM (#29919947)

I used this method in China in 2009 and after a couple of minutes, the packets began to drop.

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