I knew that I could do this but have never, until now, had a need to do it. This afternoon I needed to access documents on a secure webserver on campus that was restricted to on campus IP addresses. The easiest thing that I could come up with to access them was to shell into the server in my office then access the documents using Links. Unfortunately the webserver didn't like Links and rather than waste time finding a workaround I did the following, logged into the remote server using ssh with the -Y argument which enables trusted X11 forwarding, then I started up Firefox, e.g.
$ ssh -Y simon@192.168.0.1
which should, after passwords and other stuff, give me a shell on the remote machine, on which I can execute:
$ firefox &
Which gave me a nice local GUI to the instance of Firefox that I had just started running on the remote server. Again, a simple technique that I am posting here mostly as an
aide memoire for myself as it is the kind of thing that I forget about when I most need it.
