Portage through Socks proxy with remote DNS (iPhone tunnel)

[trix]

Alright, I'm comfortable with gentoo in general but new to network setups beyond wifi or plugnplay eth0. Recently I lost my internet carrier, and decided to connect my Gentoo PC to the internet by tunnelling through my iPhone.

My setup is like this: I use a package called itunnel which lets me SSH into my iPhone through the USB cable, then I use "./itunnel 3023" to open the connection for ssh via port 3023, then I type "ssh -D 9000 -p 3023 127.0.0.1" then the root password it prompts me for. I've setup firefox to use that socks proxy at port 9000 with remote DNS and it works! (I'm using it to post this).

However, one big thing is missing. Portage! I can't emerge --sync or fetch packages automatically. I can fetch them manually in the browser, pop them in /usr/portage/distfiles then emerge them that way, but my system is quickly becoming out of date (been three months since last sync) because I still can't --sync. Is it possible to use this setup and have portage fetch and sync correctly through the socks 5 proxy with remote DNS?

Thank you for any help!
- trix

[trix]

I've tried using the http_proxy setting in make.conf, but it doesn't seem to work, it's possibly because it has to get the DNS information remotely, through the phone, as in firefox I had to set "use_remote_dns" to true before it worked.

It's also possibly because ssh -D is a socks proxy and not an http one, I don't know enough about this to know the difference. All I know is it's extremely frustrating to kind of have internet but not really.

Thanks again for any and all help
- trix