Linux – Tunnel Ethernet Packets over SSH

You are using SSH to set up a local SOCKS server that tunnels to your SSH server. You mention that your reason for doing that is that "local connection is slow" but I fail to see how tunneling to a SSH server will make it faster.

Anyway, your problem is that Subversion can connect through a HTTP proxy or an SSH tunnel, but it has no idea about SOCKS. So you need to SOCKSify Subversion by capturing all its TCP connects and redirecting them to the SOCKS proxy.

Instead of paraphrasing those who have done it before, I'll point you to their detailed explanations :

• http://blog.yimingliu.com/2009/03/05/ssh-subversion-through-socks-proxy-on-mac-os-x/
• http://sites.google.com/a/gapps.oxuni.org.uk/oliver/Home/Teleworking

Or in a nutshell mostly cut'n'pasted from Oliver's page :

Debian contains two socksifiers that are also available on sourceforge. The most recently updated one is ProxyChains, and it's quite straightforward to configure. Most socksifiers work in a similar fashion so these instructions should be a reasonable general case. To configure ProxyChains you just need to edit $(HOME)/.proxychains/proxychains.conf to have only the following lines:

DynamicChain
tcp_read_time_out 15000
tcp_connect_time_out 10000
[ProxyList]
socks5 127.0.0.1 8090
# NB: for some reason 'localhost' doesn't work in the above line

All you then need to do is 'wrap' svn in ProxyChains.

proxychains svn commit

In the above example, the svn application was none the wiser that its TCP connects to the Subversion server were redirected down your SOCKS proxy."

You'll need to make sure it's a reverse tunnel, so under SSH->Tunnels ensure the buttons at the bottom say "Remote" and "Auto (or IPv4)". I couldn't get this working however so I'd be interested to see what the problem was.