I figure I will eventually get this to work if I keep playing with it, but I figured somebody here might be able to quickly point me in the right direction. Even simple links to relevant material would be nice, and most appreciated.

Basically, there are times when my local internet connection is a bit laggy and unreliable (plus my upstream bandwidth is capped), but I still have a reliable 100 mbps network connection to a machine that has an (uncapped) 10 mbps connection to an internet backbone.

During these times, I normally ssh into an account on this Solaris machine, and use xwin to display a remote browser on my computer. This becomes a pain when my local connection fails entirely, because I need to install appropriate applications on the remote machine to use them (e.g. GAIM for instant messages) and then maintain a second set of applications there.

I'd like to set up a system where by I change a few settings on my local (Windows) computer, and then certain applications will connect through the Solaris box to get to the net, and necessary communication is obviously relayed back to me.

So I've tried to research what I need to get this to work, and I'm not sure I have it all down. In some cases the terminology can be a bit confusing to me.

It seems like what I might need is a SOCKS implementation on the Solaris machine which can forward my requests from here to the internet. Then I tell IE or whoever to use that machine for internet requests. I see the section in the IE config and my FTP client to do this, but I don't see it I some applications like AIM or GAIM. Perhaps there's a way to tell windows to forward all traffic through certain port through the server? Or perhaps I'll need to use this program to capture all network traffic and forward it through the server.

So should I just use the reference implementation of SOCKS (for Educational / Personal Use) or is there a better way to do it? Or should I be looking at proxy software? A lot of people seem to like Squid, but it seems to do a lot that would be useless to me, like cache data.

Also, would it ever be helpful to use SSH to tunnel a local port to a port on the Solaris machine? Maybe somehow helps in programs that don’t let me specify the location of the SOCKS server? (Or does the ssh tunnel do nothing other than provide encryption?)

Finally, it’s important to note that I do NOT have root privileges on the Solaris box and thus can’t make serious changes to it, but I’m hoping I won’t have trouble installing it to my area of the disk, using ssh to manually start it, and have it use high-numbered ports that aren’t already in use.

Thanks in advance for all the sage advise,

John