hidden-ssh, irc, ftp, etc etc via socat

[Roger Dingledine]

I just connected to a hidden-service irc server. The hidden wiki lists
one such hidden irc server:  irc://37lnq2veifl4kar7.onion:6667

You can fetch socat (apt-get it in debian, go to
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/socat/ for red hat packages) and run

socat TCP4-LISTEN:4242,fork SOCKS4A:localhost:37lnq2veifl4kar7.onion:6667,socksport=9050

Then you can direct your irc client at localhost port 4242, and voila.

Switch out 6667 for 22, and you can connect to a hidden-service ssh
(though there are still issues with getting your known_hosts right,
but that's ssh's problem.)

Yay. Looks like we won't have to do our kludgy tsocks patch anytime
soon.

There's a longer description about using socat for tor at
http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/SocatHelp

(Thanks to Lolo for noticing this and getting it working!)
--Roger