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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I just ran into a case where I needed a VPN for a short lived task. Ally bank blocks creation of time deposit accounts while in a foreign country, despite me already having an account with them.

Takes less than 10 minutes to setup a VPN with algo on DO and I just shut it down after my task was done. Cost me $0.02. The support for Wireguard + OSX Wireguard App is perfect and super easy.

Please tell your coworkers, thank you!

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For simple usages like this, you can also create an SSH socks proxy with one SSH command, and then configure your browser to use a local port as a socks proxy.

Does not require any software installed on the server, and the whole setup should be quicker then configuring VPN server and client.

Also, an HTTP proxy is a couple steps more to setup, but will allow you to use command line tools on the client, not just the browser. The majority of command line tools support http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables.

An easy and pretty secure way to setup an HTTP proxy is: 1. Install tinyproxy. 2. Configure it to listen only on localhost and start it. 3. SSH port forward localhost:8888 from your server. For example to the same port on your client. 4. Configure your clients to use localhost:8888 as a proxy.

Of course there are alternatives like this and thank you for sharing, but in my eyes, this actually requires significantly more work and mental thought. Spinning up a droplet on DO and opening the config file in wireguard is literally executing one command and doesn't require touching my browser configuration. Takes a couple more clicks to just delete the droplet. Done.

Will do! I'm glad to hear that it worked well for you.

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