geeky post, beware

The network people here either by design or by incompetance, is preventing me from connecting me to a server I run at home. I can make the initial connection, but it doesn't get past that. I can use a VPN or SSH tunnel to my home and connect, because then it's like I'm at home and connecting from there. Today I ran across this page for using Putty and a SSH server to create a SOCKS5 proxy. It works great and now I have less complicated configurations to setup on my laptop when I go to work. I figure some other people on my friends list might get some use out of that page too.