Occasionally, my ISP (BT) does lack in connection speed. It’s not necessarily their fault, but one of the links or bridges connecting is slow. I was downloading some large mixes that a friend had done on his server, but I was only getting 40KB/s on a 200mb file, slow. I thought about it, and was wondering how I can use my dreamhost server to my advantage. I asked a couple of friends, and a mate, William told me about the SSH function, wget.

WGET tells the server to download a file of another server. As my dreamhost server sits in a huge data center with huge pipes hooked up to it I can hit speeds that I can only dream of. I know that I can hit high speeds when downloading files from my server, roughly 700KB/s – which is nearly topping out my home internet connection. Once I told the server what to download, i was hitting file transfer rates on 10MB/s on some (server to server).

So how do we go about downloading files then?

First we need to SSH into our server;

user@example.com  - then we enter our password once prompted.

once we are logged in – simply type

“wget [insertthefilelocation]”

SSH Socks Proxy – Being Secure Online Occasionally, some services like us to be in the presence of America to use their service, or our internet service is down maybe. Maybe your on a unknown wifi channel and want to give yourself a bit more security. Eh? A proxy in otherwords? Yes, that’s essentially really what we are doing – for those are confused by a proxy – it’s the middleman between you and the location that you are trying to reach.

Today, i’m going to show you how to use SOCKS, or a SSH Proxy. Now, you will need a web host for this, and it needs to have SSH support for this. I know MediaTemple & Dreamhost do – check with your host just to make sure.

We’ll be doing on this a mac and using Firefox as our browser, so first we need to open the terminal – for those who don’t know where that is: Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal Now we need your username and address of your server. ssh -ND 9999 you@example.com

Now, of course you replace this with your credentials which you should. It will then ask you for your password, you should also know this too. For dreamhost – this is the same as your default FTP details.

After you have entered your password, it will not print anything else – it’s job is done and ready. Setting up FireFox to work with your SSH Proxy.

If everything looks like that, then were good to go! Hit ok, and so if you can load the start of FireFox. I hope you find this helpful, it’s works for me and I find it useful at WiFi hotspots where sometimes you don’t feel secure. If you have another medthod, please leave a comment or send me an email.