How can I setup a SOCKS4 or 5 proxy on CentOS 5.8?

Question

I live in Iran and due to its restrict censorship, We all have extreme difficulties accessing normal sites and services. So I thought this would be a great idea to setup a proxy server on my VPS, so that I myself could find a way around this censorship. Can anyone show me a step by step working tutorial on this matter? Or guide me in the right direction? I will be grateful.

Answer 1

Do you know flossmanuals.net? They've got a great manual on How to Bypass Internet Censorship (also as epub and pdf for offline use -- and note the translations, among others in Farsi).

Among many tools and methods, they cover SOCKS proxies. But given a VPS somewhere, the other ways they mention should be considered, too. (For example how to use ssh to act as a SOCKS server, or use OpenVPN).

Beside guiding you through configuring Firefox to use SOCKS for everything (i.e. not forget DNS), they also mention tools to socksify any application (we recently had this issue coming up here).

Do not skip the chapter on Circumvention and Safety.

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In particular, using a machine myvps that you can ssh into; setting up a local (say, on laptop) SOCKS5 Proxy (laptop --> myvps --> internet) can be done via running

ssh -D 1080 accountname@myvps

on the laptop. After the connection is established, you can use 127.0.0.1:1080 on laptop as a SOCKS5 server. (I'm referring to OpenSSH here, but PuTTY can do this, via Connection, SSH, Tunnels in the configuration.)

In Firefox you can tunnel all traffic through the SOCKS server via

• Preferences - Advanced - Network - Settings...: set this to manual, SOCKS host 127.0.0.1, port 1080; and
• the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns setting in about:config (just enter this as the URL), set this to true.