The joy of proxy servers.

[TechMage]

[James S]

[Dihnekis]

i put i dont know, because the question confused me. I know what a proxy is, but i have no idea how i would go about setting one up, or why. All i know is that they are bad, and my school is evil.

[refractor]

At home my firewall/router runs <a href="http://www.privoxy.org">privoxy</a>, which is configured by default to remove things like referer information, kill cookies, remove banners, deactivate pop-ups and funky stuff like that (Fett - my proxy is a good thing). That gives me slightly more anonymity that your average Internet user... but not all that much really.

While I'm at work I bounce (well, tunnel) through a friend's squid-based proxy.

I don't use an external anonymising proxy per se... I'm not that paranoid (I tried one once but it was too slow, IIRC).

[Dihnekis]

[James S]

[Diego Cueva]

[Dihnekis]

[sponge]

[David Horn]

[refractor]

Depends what kind of general advice you want

My configuration (I use it at work to bypass the company firewall):

Internet Explorer is configured to talk to an external Squid proxy on port 25 (that's the SMTP socket for mail).

Thus, any HTTP requests originating from my machine are thrown outwards to my friend's proxy (and look to an untrained network administrator like mail).

That's a Linux box running Squid, which takes my request, grabs the page, images, etc, and spews it back at me on port 25 (again, looking like mail).


I have a similar proxy setup going on my ADSL line (which uses a dynamic IP->static name mapping system to always be resolvable by name) as a backup too.

HTH,

Ref.

[sponge]

Wow refractor, must look like a whole lot of mail ;)

[Dihnekis]

do you do that so they cant track where you have been? Or just to go on the internet?

[refractor]

I do it just to go on the internet. Our management changed and the "new" director's arcane wisdom is that there's no work-related stuff on the Internet (I'm a programmer...), so they cut our Internet access... so I "improvised". It's ethically dubious, but at the end of the day it does help me get my job done.