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, but found it just to hard to just configure in a few minutes.

I'm a ruby programmer and I knew Github once released a small open-source proxy programm. It's called proxymachine, made by @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:

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 Proxy up and running.

@nerdsein got another solution: Mocks, "My Own soCKs Server." 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"}