I'm still not sure I'm seeing how this works though. Can you explain how you have GAIM set up to use the tunnel? I don't see what options you'd put in. You must have done the -D trick, with SOCKS and localhost, or something. But how do things know to get to login.oscar.aol.com:5190? Do you specify that somewhere? Not seeing that.

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever got it working using -L. I think that may be because it doesn't forward UDP traffic. With the -D option, you just specify the local port to connect to and it takes care of the rest, mimicing a SOCKS 4 proxy. As the man page for ssh says about the -D option:

-D Specifies a local ``dynamic'' application-level port forwarding.

             This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local

             side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connec-

             tion is forwarded over the secure channel, and the application

             protocol is then used to determine where to connect to from the

             remote machine.  Currently the SOCKS4 protocol is supported, and

             ssh will act as a SOCKS4 server.  Only root can forward privi-

             leged ports.  Dynamic port forwardings can also be specified in

             the configuration file.

it determines where to connect by refering to the original requset from the application.


Of course, none of that helps if you're not using OpenSSH. You can get Win32 binaries from here. I've just run through a quick test on one of my machines here, and using the -D option, with GAIM set to proxy to localhost on the port specified as a SOCKS4 proxy, works flawlessly.