[krick]

Surprised to see it here, as I assumed that everyone on HN would know already how to use ssh proxy.

Nevertheless, in my experience Firefox works astonishingly bad with it. From time to time (probably, as some connections expire or whatever: I'm pretty sure it depends on network configuration at your location) Firefox just stops responding to user actions. It doesn't really freeze: buttons are clickable and you can open a new tab, but clicking on a link or entering a new url does nothing. No errors, simply nothing. I never filled a bug report, as I cannot actually work out what happens or how to reproduce it, but that thing happens to me only when Firefox is working through SOCKS 5 via ssh and it's frustrating as hell.

[jlgaddis]

That's odd. As another anecdote, I use this nearly everyday to access internal services on work's network (I work remotely). I use Chrome normally and have Firefox set up to use my "SOCKS over SSH" proxy and can't recall the last time I had any issues with it.

[Cieplak]

I've had weird experiences with long-lived ssh tunnels and have often resorted to initializing the ssh tunnel from a python script and using a heartbeat to manage the state of the tunnel to terminate and reinitiate the tunnel process if it hangs for more than 10 seconds. That only works if the applications working over the tunnel can tolerate dropped TCP connections, eg HTTP + some connection retry logic which opens a TCP socket per request vs rsyslog (without RELP) which trusts TCP's ack mechanism.

One hypothesis for your firefox experience:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/344863/ssh-new-connection-beg...

[miopa]

I use Firefox with FoxyProxy extension for years (both on Windows and Linux) with more than 20 different SOCKS 5 via ssh proxies simultaneously (with configured IP rules for each), had no problems whatsoever.