can i run a proxy at home and point msn from work trhough there?

red-i · 07-16-03, 01:55 PM

Ok here's the deal. I'd like to set up a proxy server at home and point MSN (at work) to route through my home proxy server. is this possible? I don't have much experience with proxies so can anyone give me some tips?

my home comp is behind a linksys router. I installed some easy proxy app at home, set it to run on port 80, and port forwarded port 80 from my router to the desktop runnign the proxy, but i can't seem to connect to it from work... (either in msn or in IE).. any tips? I'm acutally trying this out for a friend who's on a locked down network at work and has to hop around on different proxy servers every day using a list he found on the web (but they go up and down alot, so he wants to set one up at home..)

BipolarChucker · 07-17-03, 11:38 AM

http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

This is one you can run on your own home system BUT you need a little understanding of Internet Information Server (IIS) in order to set it up. Also you should look into securing your webserver once it is publically accessible. A standard install of the IIS Lockdown tool and URLscan from Microsoft will go a long way to protecting it from malicious surfers.

You'll also need to install ActiveState ActivePerl. http://www.activestate.com/

I run this one myself incase I need to do anything cheeky from work. Basically it runs from a web server using a Perl script so you first need to suss out how to install and run Perl scripts on a Windows machine.

There's lots of guides etc on how to do this and ActiveState's installer should hopefully do most of the work for you.

The default configuration makes the URL for the site you are using look like this http://www.yourservername.com/nph-pr...revisiting/com so if he's visiting pr0n sites (naughty!) then the sysadmin will know what's going on. You can encode the URL though.

One further thing you'll need to do is password protect access to the Perl script itself or the sysadmin can simply visit the page and get to see the site you visited.

I tried a hell of a lot of scripts and this is by far the best one available, it is also the one that LOADS of the free proxy servers use. It is freeware under the GNU GPL.

red-i · 07-17-03, 11:41 AM

thanks! I'll check into it. So basically i need IIS running.. I've set it up before so I should be ok.

mattf · 07-17-03, 12:07 PM

You might want to take a look at running a SSH server at home and then using an SSH client at work to connect to the server. The tunnel is encrypted and you can send just about any protocol down the pipe.

basically what happens is on your work box, you'd set localhost:port and then your ssh client would intercept these calls and pass them thru the tunnel to your home box. If you are connecting to a mail server for example, you home box would just forward that request. You'd need to run some kinda proxy at home for the http/s stuff.

One real bonus - you can set the SSH server at home to listen on any port. here where I work, _everything_ is blocked except 443. So I just set my home server to lsited on 443 and off I go.(Plus they only allow http/s traffic so thank goodness for corkscrew - it makes everything look like an https request)

I've no idea if you can do this with win32, but with Linux or BSD, it's a breeze.