I am trying to set up a secure proxy for my work. This article perm linksuggests I should be using SSH Tunnel + SOCKS Proxy Forwarding. Do I need to have access to a particular shell program on the server, or any shell program will do? I have bash, tcsh, and zsh available.
You run ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server on your local machine. You don't need anything else on the remote end except a shell to login to. So bash, tcsh, or zsh is fine.
Once you run your ssh -D command, it's going to look just like you've ssh'ed to "ip-address-of-ssh-server" without the -D 9999 flag. You'll be in a shell and you'll see a command prompt on the remote machine. You can just leave it alone. You'll just need to setup your browser to use SOCKS proxy at localhost:9999.