Free me ! (with SSH , Firefox and Putty)

Using the Internet behind a national firewall that blocks a bunch of sites, (including Youtube,

This is what you get when you ask for youtube.com

dailymotion …), some very interesting blogs (political reasons), SMTP ports(leaving no choice to use the ISP’s unsecured SMTP server), and of course every proxy server or web proxy, is a real pain.

Jap was one of my favorite solutions, it was created to solve such problems, but it has became lately a paying service with some limited free servers with a very very low bandwidth (at least for me).

There was also some unblocked web proxy, but it seems that our national firewall team is doing a good job, since no one last for more than a month.

Having a few dollars on my paypal account, I decided to make use of them.

The first idea was to try Jap’s paying service, and even if it was quite fast, it was not acceptable at all, since I’ll have to pay 1€ for 120 Mo, and the remaining Mo were disappearing very fast even with a low web traffic.

Later, I discovered the possibility of use of ssh tunnels, this was a great idea because ssh connections are not filtered (like the usual proxy connections), every TCP connection can be tunneled (msn, SMTP, pop3, maybe Counter-Strike ), and of course it is supposed to be very secure.

So, before jumping into the wide, I downloaded Debian server, and tested it on a virtual machine, with puppy and Firefox on my real machine, and everything was great.

I started then to search for a cheap VPS solution, I will not need disk space, I will just use some very moderate bandwidth with my 256k connection, and the best I was able to find was … Guess how much ..

Well, it was $4.95 per month (justgotvps.com), I didn’t care about any specification of this offer.

I applied very fast, and got (very fast too) my identification details, at first I wasn’t able to correctly connect with putty, but later I discovered that the informations provided to ssh connect were not correct nor the link provided on the site panel (IP address and port number).

Finally, I just got everything working when supplying the correct VPS IP to putty, now my connection seems to be quit faster (using the SSL compression), and I can finally access youtube …

This what you get with Putty + Firefox + SSH

I’ll be testing this service for the next month, maybe the SMTP connection too, I hope I wont get troubles , I’m not sure if using encrypted connection is legal here, but who cares, I just need to visit youtube.

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Edit: About justgotvps.com, their support is very poor , my VPS stop responding after I did some manipulations, and until now I cant get it fixed. (I finally decided to pay for another one)

The connection speed is not excellent (using SSH),sometime very slow, and downloading barely goes above 18 KB/s.