Black Coffee Blues

In a departure from my recent affinity for all things dissent, I ask for help from the geek community in resolving a problem that I currently have.  Given, I know not whether any geeks read my site, but if you do, please feel free to put forth your assertions and opinions regarding this matter.  Here is the scenario:

In testing a particular product for work, I came across a requirement to detect ssh over icmp.  That said, I installed ptunnel on my laptop and another host in the lab.  From there I set the latter host as the proxy with a destination of a web server on the internet and my laptop as the client.  With everything set up and listening, I ssh’d to the web server via localhost: and all was fancy and dancy like Nancy.  Unfortunately, I was not able to proxy http over the ssh session, which had me scratching my head a bit since I normally can simply ssh to my home machine and it will forward the traffic out from there.  I do understand that peraps the web server to which I have the ssh connection may not be forwarding http traffic for a reason of security, but I also read the following in regard to ptunnel:

There is some limitations however, the functionality of web browsers is limited due to having to make several connections to different places for a single page. The HTML will not indicate it should be passed through localhost. In HTTP 1.1 the Host header must be passed, most clients will pass the host of whatever domain they are currently connecting to, so you will have requests for host: localhost, which most probably wont exist on the web servers configuration and will just be rejected.

However, I read in a comment on digg the following in response:

He mentions in the article that it’s not currently possible to tunnel web traffic through this system. Now, perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but if ssh works, couldn’t you just add something like ‘-L 80:localhost:80’ to the ssh arguments to set up port forwarding? Sure, it’s a bit of a hack, what with a tunnel through a tunnel and all that, but it seems like it ought to work just fine....

Again, I tried the latter, but to no avail.  I find that tunneling over icmp is pretty damned cool since it is a subversion for a number of things (ie. firewall policies, hotspots that charge you monnnay, etc), but I would want to see it tunnel http properly so that I can say it it the bomb diggity.  I could also try tunneling over DNS, but for all intended purposes right now, I simply want to get this part working.

There is the scenario.  If you are a geek in the know about how this might work (you could just be really savvy with SSH params) and think you could help me brainstorm this, let me know.  I think it is a good test.