You’re probably already familiar with ssh’s portforwarding abilities
— where ssh -L8000:somehost:80 otherhost will set up
an encrypted tunnel where local connections to port 8000 will be
tunneled through to otherhost and then connected to port 80 on somehost
from there — and if you’re like me you might even have a couple
of shell scripts which establish ssh sessions that do nothing but
tunnel (ssh -naxTfN -L3128:proxy:3128 somemachineatwork).

I found my list of forwarded ports was expanding a bit fast for my
liking and was pleased to discover the -D option to
OpenSSH. Invoking ssh -D portnum makes ssh act like
a socks4 proxy, accepting socks proxy requests at the local end of
the ssh session and tunneling them to the remote end where the
requested connection is made. That way, I can point my web browser
and IRC client and anything else socks-aware at the socks port I
specify, and then they’ll handle setting up tunnels to the multiple
hosts I connect to, without requiring any additional software at the
far end.

That’s really handy and all, until you have an application that needs
that sort of feature but doesn’t speak socks — and that’s
where tsocks comes in.
Tsocks is a transparent SOCKS proxy library that works via LD_PRELOAD.
You preload libtsocks.so and your programs’ TCP connections all
magically end up going via the SOCKS proxy you’ve configured tsocks
to use (or you can just use the included tsocks command
to do the preload step for you).

So not only do you have ssh dynamically establishing tunnels for you,
suddenly almost everything you have knows how to use them! There are
a couple of gotchas, the big one being DNS not being proxied by
default (since it’s UDP), but it’s a great way to get ssh tunnels
that always Just Work even if you didn’t think you needed the tunnel
when you set up all your other tunnels.