scholar-pac

A proxy auto-config (PAC) file for those scholars who are relying on a ssh tunnel to their school/department machine to download publications from those digital libraries purchased by their school/universities.

Setup ssh config for tunneling

Before setup the ssh tunnel, man ssh and man ssh_config are highly recommended.

More readings about ssh and ssh_config:

• SSH Hacks
• Simplify Your Life With an SSH Config File

Do a vim .ssh/config to setup a config file for ssh. An example is like below:

Host tunnel-name
    HostName xxxxxxxxx
    Port 22
    DynamicForward localhost:1080
    ExitOnForwardFailure yes
    TCPKeepAlive yes
    Compression yes
    CompressionLevel 9
    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 60
    User yourusername

Those options are at your decisions.

Setup Chrome

There are many options to explore on different operating systems and browsers for proxying. I will give an example on Chrome.

Install SwitchyOmega

Delete those default profiles. Add a new profile and select PAC file, import the PAC file in this repository. Using a url of this file also works: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yishanhe/scholar-pac/master/scholar.pac. Name this profile and save it.

Usage

First, start your tunnel ssh -f -N tunnel-name (You can use an alias if you find inputing ssh -f -N annoying.) This will run in background. In case, you can find this process and kill it by ps aux | grep tunnel-name to get its pid xxxxxx and kill xxxxxx.

After turninig on your SwitchyOmega to the profile you previously set, it is all set.

Enjoy it.

Try google my ip to test or just go to IEEE explorer to test.

• Sometimes, you need to refresh the targeted page several times such that you can see "purchase"->"download".
• Sometimes, the ssh link may not be stable on celluar tethering. Better turn on compression.

Accepting Pull Request to update the PAC file.

The current PAC file only contains a minimal requirement for my usage. And it should be expanded to include more digital libraries.