I use ssh -D to cheap VPSes, and dynamically use the proxy based on Firefox's FoxyProxy to route different URL requests through different networks.

Handy for anything from region locked websites (extremely common in streaming video) to local censorship (increasingly common in Western countries, especially around torrents).

Having to set up individual port mappings for arbitrary URLs (whose actual hosts may change on an arbitrary basis) is not a viable alternative, IMO.

Maybe I misunderstood you though. Is there an easier alternative approach that makes ssh -D superfluous?

We have quite a few different storage solutions, and among those most have really bad command line interfaces. At least one of them is web only, and trying to wrap it with WWW::Mechanize or something similar would be difficult due to all the fun stuff they do with javascript. Other solutions even want you to have flash support.

Most of us (Ingvar included) prefer CLI any day. I'm so looking forward to the day where all these SAN's are retired, and we're running Ceph for all.

> I always remember who proposed it and that alone discourages me from ever using it.

And, uhm, who was it? Is it supposed to be common knowledge?