Accessing IP restricted website seamlessly with PHProxy and Switcheroo Redirector
As some of you may have noticed, I am doing a PhD in a certain university. Rather surprisingly, I can't access one of the e-journal website that is related to my field. Fortunately, I am an alumnus of another university. Due to the fact that I joined a certain society in that university, I have shell-access to one of the machines on that university's network. That machine also provides PHP-enabled web-hosting.
There are two ways to access that particular e-journal. I used to do SSH-tunneling. However I find SSH tunnelling cumbersome, even with plugins like Proxy SwitchyOmega 1), mainly because I need to type in SSH -D1080 hostname
and click a button on Proxy Switchy Omega.
My new method involves using PHProxy2) and Switcheroo Redirector3). PHProxy works quite well with that e-journal website. Interestingly, that particular e-journal website doesn't work with some of the newer PHP based proxies. I basically set up the PHProxy, and use Switcheroo Redirector to redirect all the URL for that e-journal website to PHProxy.
For security, I set up password authentication in .htaccess
. I also make sure that I use the https URL in the redirector.