Update

14 January 2008 – I played around with the tethering today, and it works perfectly.  I am able to surf to a variety of pages without any problems.  The only thing that has changed since last time is that I have finally upgraded my firmware.  I am currently using firmware version 2.2 and everything is working perfectly!  I am using a program called ProxifierPE so that all my programs redirect their requests through the proxy.  I also discovered a new App that is supposed to make tethering even easier, and will try that out in the upcoming days and post my findings — unfortunately I have to do a bunch of other stuff to get my Windows XP computer ready (its very outdated).  I am also going to find a viable alternative to ProxifierPE.

I have a computer that does not have a wireless card, so I thought it would be fun to use my iPod Touch as a wireless card!  A brilliant idea, I thought, and after a little bit of searching through the internet for a way to do this, I finally arrived at a solution!  The answer was the iPhone Tunnel Suite, a program that allows you to SSH into your iPhone or iPod touch without going through the wireless card.  This feature is brilliant and definitely a must have if you are using your iPhone for storage or have any other reason to transfer files.  Its way faster than going through wireless and doesn’t kill your battery like using the wireless to SSH in does.  Using the iPhone as a network card (called Tethering), however, is a different story.  Here, I document how to use the iPhone as a wireless card, via these handy step-by-step instructions I compiled through trial and error, and also discuss why it didn’t work for me.

Purpose

There are two reasons you would want to do this:

  1. To use your iPhone’s wireless connection or 3G connection to surf the internet on a computer your iPhone is attached to.
  2. To SSH into your iPhone to transfer files without using wireless.

Requirements

In order to accomplish this you need:

  • iPod Touch or iPhone
  • A Windows PC
  • An SSH server such as OpenSSH installed on your iPod Touch or iPhone

Setup instructions

First, a disclaimer.  The iPhone Tunnel suite is written by amateur coders and is not open source or have any formal type of license.  The author was gracious enough to release it to the public for free, so it is something you should use at your own risk.

The version of iPhone Tunnel Suite that I used to set this up is version 2.6.  It is much more polished and less buggy than previous versions, so I would recommend using it if you are going to try this out.  I have provided a local download link because it appears as though the developer’s website is not always online.

  1. Make sure you can SSH into your iPhone or iPod Touch.
    1. To do this, open your favorite SSH / SFTP software in Windows and connect to your iPhone using its IP address.  Your password is most likely alpine.  My iPod is jailbroken, so I installed OpenSSH on it using the Installer Application.  I am unsure as to whether you can get OpenSSH or another SSH server through the App Store.  Perhaps someone else knows this answer.
  2. Download the iPhone Tunnel Suite 2.6 through the author’s website or using the link below.
  3. Unzip the iPhone Tunnel Suite and run the installer.  It extracts the necessary files.
  4. Fire up the application.  It makes you create a profile for your iPod.  You are required to fill out all the fields, even your iPod’s IP address.  You can probably make something up here.  You won’t need it to connect through the USB cable.
  5. With your iPhone connected via USB, click the iTunnel button to connect.  You should see the iTunnel status change to indicate a successful connection.
  6. To verify that it works, connect via the Terminal or File Browser buttons.  You should see your iPhone’s filesystem.  That means everything is good to go!  You can transfer files at will.  This is the most useful feature!
  7. Now for the hard part.  You will need to setup your browser to use the following options:
    1. You need to set your internet connection to be through a proxy.  This proxy is 127.0.0.1, port 1080.  What is important is that you set it up to use SOCKS v5 if you are given the option.  In Firefox you must also set the option network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to TRUE under about:config.
  8. Now, you can browse the internet.  Sort of.  Read more below if you think this did not work.

Problems

Oh no!  Tethering does not work!

That is what I thought when I first tried.  My home page would not load!  I just got a blank page.  Well, it turns out I could not browse to and Google sites, or any other major search engines.  So, instead I tried a simpler site.  I typed in my web address, http://www.canzanese.com and wow!  It actually worked!  So I try browsing around my site.  It is working beatifully.  I go back to google.com, and get nothing.  So I tried a variety of websites and found only simple, straightforward HTML websites seemed to work.  Why? I’m not sure.  Site like Google would time out instantly.  I tried using a third party proxy application to monitor the connection to Google, and saw everything working fine.  The problem was that the browser was saying “Not found” or just going blank and quitting right away.  The proxy app on the other hand showed the connection establish and the data transfer even after the browser had given up.

So, in the end, I deemed using the iPhone as a modem through tethering as impractical at best.  Unless I really need to see something on my big monitor, I’ll stick to checking my mail and such on the iPhone itself.  I don’t have any ideas as to why this is not working, but I will look into it if I ever get some free time.  I have also opened up comments on this page if anyone has some useful feedback!

Enjoy the Tunnel Suite and good luck!