extends: post.liquid title: fast and simple proxy server date: 02 Oct 2011 01:27:00 +0200 path: /:year/:month/:day/fast-and-simple-proxy-server --- So you have this friend sitting somewhere else in the world and want to give him a simple proxy to access a geoip-protected site or something similar. But what tool to use? When searching for a proxy I found [dante](http://www.inet.no/dante/), but found it just to hard to just configure in a few minutes. I'm a ruby programmer and I knew [Github](https://github.com) once released a small open-source proxy programm. It's called [proxymachine](https://github.com/mojombo/proxymachine), made by [@mojombo](https://github.com/mojombo/), one of the founders of github. Get it with: gem install proxymachine and you're nearly done. Pipe the following into a text file: ~~~ruby proxy do |data| next if data.size < 9 v, c, port, o1, o2, o3, o4, user = data.unpack("CCnC4a*") return { :close => "\x0\x5b\x0\x0\x0\x0\x0\x0" } if v != 4 or c != 1 next if ! idx = user.index("\x0") { :remote => "#{[o1,o2,o3,o4]*'.'}:#{port}", :reply => "\x0\x5a\x0\x0\x0\x0\x0\x0", :data => data[idx+9..-1] } end ~~~ and start it with proxymachine -h 0.0.0.0 -p 1234 -c your_socks_config.rb {:lang="text"} Tada! You got your own [SOCKS4](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#SOCKS4) Proxy up and running. [@nerdsein](https://twitter.com/#!/nerdsein/status/120258441041297409) got another solution: [Mocks](http://sourceforge.net/projects/mocks/), "**M**y **O**wn so**CK**s **S**erver." Download it over at Sourceforge, unpack it and compile the code with: gcc -lnsl -o mocks child.c error.c misc.c socksd.c up_proxy.c {:lang="text"} You can configure a little bit more than with proxymachine, but you can stick with the default config for now: PORT = 10080 MOCKS_ADDR = 0.0.0.0 LOG_FILE = mocks.log PID_FILE = mocks.pid BUFFER_SIZE = 65536 BACKLOG = 5 NEGOTIATION_TIMEOUT = 5 CONNECTION_IDLE_TIMEOUT = 300 BIND_TIMEOUT = 30 SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT = 3 MAX_CONNECTIONS = 50 FILTER_POLICY = ALLOW {:lang="text"} See the README and the config file in the archive for comments on it. Then start it with: src/mocks -c mocks.config start {:lang="text"} and kill it with: src/mocks -c mocks.config shutdown {:lang="text"} Oh, and in case you have the possibility to just ssh to the server, you can start up a SOCKS proxy on this connection, too: ssh -D1234 example.com {:lang="text"}