First, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone. There are hundreds of posts on the Internet explaining the process. You can find a good one here or this youtube video tutorial. It only takes a few minutes using blackra1n.

Assuming you have a jailbroken iPhone, open up Cydia, search and install a package named 3Proxy. This software lets you run a SOCKS proxy server on your iPhone. Next, you will need to install MobileTerminal. This package allows you to run a terminal on your iPhone. This is available on Cydia as well.

On your computer, create an adhoc wireless connection. On different OSs, the process to create an adhoc wireless connection is different – consult the Internet for a guide to create one on your OS of choice. I have Windows 7 and it can be done in a very stratight forward manner.

From your iPhone, connect to the adhoc wireless connection you created.

Tap on the network and get your iPhone’s IP on the adhoc connection.

Fire up Terminal from your Spring Board and type socks and tap return. This command starts an instance of the SOCKS server on your iPhone on port 1080.

Now, in Firefox, go to Tools>>Options>>Advanced>>Settings

Provide the IP you got from your iPhone and the port 1080.

Now, go to about:config in Firefox and set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.

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Finally, launch Safari on your iPhone and go to any random existing website — this is an important step which allows your iPhone to determine that the adhoc network cannot be used for Internet and it needs to use its 3G connection to connect to the Internet. Typically, your iPhone needs a minute to figure this out. Once done, the website should show up in Safari.

That is it — you are done. Now you will be able to use Firefox on your computer to browse the interwebs! If you need to use any other application like Skype or Bitcomet, you can do that as well. All you need to do is provide the SOCKS proxy IP and port in advanced settings of the respective application.

Hope you found this post helpful.

 I’m happy to reflect that I did stay on the positive side of most of these issues (and FYI, I did manage to quit smoking — I’ve been smoke-free for over one year now). However, all of these issues kept me away from something I devoted most of my serious student life to — recreational technology and the Internet. Not entirely, however — I did make feeble attempts to keep the fire burning through my much neglected blog at http://www.xanga.com/Too_Brown and I have been avidly reading a number of weblogs and technical forums. 

So, not surprisingly, I had a hard time setting up this website. Most of the issues were caused due to my haste. I initially signed up at blogger(also known as blogspot — a Google service) and signed up for toobrown.com from Google Apps. Google actually uses GoDaddy as the domain registrar. Very soon, I realized that blogger was not what I wanted. I wanted something I had a greater level of control over. Like the ability to SSH into my server and install applications. And use FTP.

 I signed up for these services at HostMonster. However, my domain was (and is) still hosted by GoDaddy. I managed to integrate these by changing the Nameserver DNS hosts over at GoDaddy to those served by HostMonster. However, the change is still propogating to all the DNS systems across the Internet. One peculiar issue I noticed is, while I can access my new HostMonster hosted blog through toobrown.com from here in Florida, an individual sitting in Utah or Arizona still hits my old pages hosted by GoDaddy. I did some research and apparently, it takes a while for all the DNS systems on the Internet to recognize the change.

 Finally, WordPress — I cant really say I had any real difficulties setting it up. I installed the latest version 2.3.1 with reasonable ease on my Linux server and also uploaded some layouts and common plugins. I’m really impressed by the manner in which WordPress has been designed. The design is clean and the implementation is near-flawless, to say the very least.