From what I've read, it is possible to tunnel my http requests through any other machine that I have ssh access to? Is this right?
I'm trying it right now, with a command like this

ssh -D 8080 computer.atschool.edu -Nf -l myname

it appears to bind properly, no error messages. But, if I tell firefox to use localhost 8080 as the proxy server, nothing happens!

I try to browse to www.google.com, but no page shows up. No error, no nothing, no indication that the server was ever communicated with.
Any ideas?

Btw, I use firestarter, but have turned it completely off for this experiment.

ok, well that seems ok so far. can you confirm how you're telling FF to use it? can you run a tcpdump or wireshark on lo to see the data going into the proxy port? have you tried it to other destinations? i'd wonder also if the remote daemon has been configured to remove those functions to prevent this being done.

Well, now I am at home and tried doing the exact same command to my laptop at school. Same result. Everything appears to go ok, but no page appears when I try to go to a destination. I'm telling ff to use the proxy by going Edit-->Preferences-->Network-->Settings-->Manual Proxy Configuration.

I set the host to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 8080.

Will figure out how to do tcpdump in a minute or two.

after looking into tcpdump, I tried the following command:
tcpdump port 8080

tcpdump faithfully sat there but recorded nothing, even after I switched firefox to use localhost 8080 as a proxy server.

When running tcpdump or tcpdump 80 I get lots of output, but nothing with tcpdump 8080.

interesting. Any ideas?

well are you actually defining it as the socks proxy or just the http proxy?

running "tcpdump port 8080" won't really help as it'll use eth0 by defualt. add "-i lo" to it for the loopback interface.

Ok, sorry about that. Here is the output of tcpdump

joe@desktop:~$ sudo tcpdump port 8080 -i lo
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on lo, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
10:31:00.361451 IP localhost.58404 > localhost.webcache: S 3572360087:3572360087(0) win 32792 <mss 16396,sackOK,timestamp 204806592 0,nop,wscale 6>
10:31:00.361837 IP localhost.webcache > localhost.58404: S 3562957621:3562957621(0) ack 3572360088 win 32768 <mss 16396,sackOK,timestamp 204806592 204806592,nop,wscale 6>
10:31:00.361877 IP localhost.58404 > localhost.webcache: . ack 1 win 513 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>
10:31:00.361897 IP localhost.58404 > localhost.webcache: P 1:555(554) ack 1 win 513 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>
10:31:00.361918 IP localhost.webcache > localhost.58404: . ack 555 win 530 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>
10:31:00.362143 IP localhost.webcache > localhost.58404: F 1:1(0) ack 555 win 530 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>
10:31:00.362289 IP localhost.58404 > localhost.webcache: F 555:555(0) ack 2 win 513 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>
10:31:00.362302 IP localhost.webcache > localhost.58404: . ack 556 win 530 <nop,nop,timestamp 204806592 204806592>

I can post output from more verbose commands if it will help, tell me what options to use.
I'm telling firefox to use 127.0.0.1 port 8080 as the http proxy, and then clicking the box underneath that says use this proxy server for all protocols.

Should I be clicking socks v4 or socks v5 ?

yes, putty emulates a socks proxy, not an http proxy. only use the bottom box.

Ah ha. Worked perfectly. Thanks a bunch!