[CentOS] Running firefox on a remote host on centos-4

Tue Aug 15 07:50:51 UTC 2006
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Erik Laxdal wrote:

> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> > Back in the day (read: before the latest firefox update), I used to be
> > able to ssh to a remote box, run 'firefox -local', and have that box fire
> > up its own firefox session even if I was running firefox on the system
> > from I which I sshed.  Those days seem to be gone.  No matter what I try, if
> > I've got firefox running on my local desktop, the remote firefox command
> > just fires off another instance of the local firefox session.
> > 
> > I've got several boxes running monitoring daemons reporting via http only to
> > the localhost, so this was a handy feature for me.  Is there any official
> > way to get it back?  If not, I guess I'll have to hack a 'localfirefox'
> > script that doesn't do the nasty mozilla-xremote-client trick.
> > 
> > Ah, progress... *sigh*
> > 
> 
> As an alternative solution, why don't you take advantage of ssh's port
> forwarding ability and use just your local copy of firefox to access the web
> server as if you were local to the box.  When you connect to the remote box,
> use something like:
> 
>      ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 remotebox
> 
> Then on your local box's copy of firefox point the url to:
> 
>      http://localhost:8080/
> 
> This should (assuming the network is slower than gigabit) provide you with the
> fastest firefox response and use less resources on the remote systems.  There
> are other possible benefits such as, with multiple ssh sessions and different
> port redirects (8081, 8082, ...) you could monitor daemons (different boxes)
> from different tabs in a single firefox window.
> 
> The one caveat with this is if you are using virtual hosts on the web server,
> further tweaks to the local hosts file and the local firefox url will be
> required.

It's probably easier to use

	ssh -D 1080 remotebox

and then configure localhost:1080 as your Socks server in firefox. Or you 
could use proxy extension that allows you to switch from proxy server with 
a single click.

This allows you to use different Socks servers on different ports and 
switch between them using an extension.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]