The title explains a lot. I have linux installed on my USB (I just can't use windows anymore) so that I can use it at school. The other day I read an article where a man used port forwarding to get around hotel firewalls blocking his email. I was wondering first of all if I can use this to get around websense (that pain-in-the-*ss government web blocker at school that blocks pretty much all useful sites) by port forwarding through my laptop, and secondly, since this is important in this situation, how to ssh to my laptop from any computer with an internet connection (still can't get this to work, I think it's because I haven't configured openssh properly).

Okay then, so yeah, thanks

It sounds like you have 2 separate problems that you want to resolve, with one depending on the other:

1. Be able to connect to your laptop from a remote location through the internet.
2. Use ssh tunneling to send web traffic through your laptop to bypass any restrictions from your current location

To solve issue 1, you will probably want to be able to connect to your home computer without having to remember a (probably dynamic) ip address, you can use one of the free dynamic dns services such as dyndns.com or no-ip.com. Your home router may already have the capability to update these services automatically when your home ip address changes. Then enable either a dmz to your ssh server or specify port forwarding for the ssh service.

To solve issue 2, set up an ssh tunnel, then set up your web browser to use the ssh tunnel. Here is a tutorial for how to do that: http://parabing.com/2011/04/01/ssh-t...e-web-surfing/

Note that the remote location that you are trying to connect from may very well block port 22 as well. You can modify the ssh server running from your home server to use a port that is not blocked (probably port 80).

Evading your school's firewall could be harmful to your schools network, and as such violates rule #14. This thread is being closed.