then I suppose I'll use netcat. I suppose I put 'nc- p 5050' in a file somewhere. Could someone tell me which file?
funny.... reading the man page for nc (trying to figure out how to get it to work) was a hoot! the copyright section is rather entertaining. check it out!

here is the excerpt I was talking about:

COPYRIGHT
       Netcat is entirely my own creation, although plenty of other code was
       used as examples. It is freely given away to the Internet community in
       the hope that it will be useful, with no restrictions except giving
       credit where it is due. No GPLs, Berkeley copyrights or any of that
       nonsense. The author assumes NO responsibility for how anyone uses it.
       If netcat makes you rich somehow and you're feeling generous, mail me a
       check.   If you are affiliated in any way with Microsoft Network, get a
       life. Always ski in control. Comments, questions, and patches to hob‐
       bit@avian.org.

NOTES
       Some port names in /etc/services contain hyphens -- netcat currently
       will not correctly parse those unless you escape the hyphens with back‐
       slashes (e.g. "netcat localhost 'ftp\-data'").

BUGS
       Efforts have been made to have netcat "do the right thing" in all its
       various modes. If you believe that it is doing the wrong thing under
       whatever circumstances, please notify me and tell me how you think it
       should behave. If netcat is not able to do some task you think up,
       minor tweaks to the code will probably fix that. It provides a basic
       and easily-modified template for writing other network applications,
       and I certainly encourage people to make custom mods and send in any
       improvements they make to it. Continued feedback from the Internet com‐
       munity is always welcome!

EXAMPLES
       For several netcat recipes, please see /usr/share/doc/netcat/README.gz
       and /usr/share/doc/netcat/README.Debian.gz.

AUTHOR
       This manual page was written by Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> and Robert
       Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>, cribbing heavily from Netcat's README file.

       Netcat was written by a guy we know as the Hobbit <hobbit@avian.org>.

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Ed <plug@0x1b.com> wrote:

Squid is a proxy server found at http://www.squid-cache.org/
I would guess that apt-get thinks of it as squid-cache.

Unless you already have Squid (doesn't sound like it) already set up -
this is a bit over the top just to let port 5050 past the firewall +
NAT.
If you have a home network, Squid is a good way to control access to
the Internet. If you have one computer on a broadband connection, then
just opening port 5050 should be enough, add forwarding if you have
NAT setup. Squid is a heavy service, other tunneling tools exist like
nc (aka netcat) or ssh or stunnel that will be much easier to set up.

Once you are set up, you should check to see which service you have
listening at port 5050 with something like "netstat -ta" or wireshark,
etc

Happy Holidays - Ed
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