Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Proxy

IMAP over HTTP?

DU — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:49:45 -0800

IMAP through an uncooperative proxy? I'm pretty sure my ideal solution is technically impossible and that simplest workaround is going to be unattractive from a convenience or elegance POV, but:

At work, I can check my personal mail through webmail (i.e. over http(s)). But I would prefer to use Thunderbird. However, the firewall/proxy doesn't allow IMAP. Is there a way I can do this anyway?

My original thought was to tunnel over SSH, but even assuming I can do that on this end, I'm not sure how I'd do it on the server end. (It's a hosted account thing, so I assume I have some latitude, but I don't have full control.)

A coworker ssh's (in a terminal window) to his home machine and runs Mutt or something there, but the whole point here is that I want all my mail to show up inside of Thunderbird.

He also suggested I could do port forwarding on my home machine. It sounds like maybe this old AskMe is the same thing. That seems ugly. Plus I hate to potentially screw up my home network by installing new firmware just to get it working. But maybe that's the only way? And if I do that, is openwrt still the best or is tomato the new hotness?

Does Xbox 360 have a proxy option with authentications?

omaralarifi — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:17:06 -0800

Does Xbox 360 have a proxy option with authentications such as username and password with it? Or PPTP w/ authentications. Also does it have a VPN support?

Getting Steam client to work correctly behind a proxy?

your mildly obsessive average geek — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:20:41 -0800

Getting Steam to work from behind various firewalls and WiFi access points always seems to involve banging heads with network admins (if at all available) about opening various ports. I figured I could overcome that by "proxifying" Steam - I run an SSH tunnel, start ProxyCap and then setup a rule inside ProxyCap to wrap all Steam requests to the SSH tunnel.

This works fine for things like the "My Games" tab or the "Friends" tab, but the Steam homepage or Community pages don't work. Instead I get the IE "page could not be displayed" error message. I tried to workaround this by setting up a rule in ProxyCap to tunnel "all" requests from "all" programs but that doesn't seem to help.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this, I'd appreciate it!

Living abroad and can't access Gmail or Facebook - help!

nicoleincanada — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:01:16 -0800

I can search Google, read the news and view most websites, but specific sites like Facebook and Gmail won't load on my Mac Powerbook - I just get page load errors. Any idea what the problem is? I'm a Canadian living in France temporarily, and I've taken my laptop from home with me. While here I'm using a shared internet connection at a school, and although I can do web-searching and such, Gmail and Facebook won't load, in Firefox or Safari (or even the crappy discontinued version of Internet Exporer I just downloaded in the hope that it might work). I suspect the problem is with my computer, since other people using the same network connection are able to access these sites with no problems.

The page load error message suggests I might have a firewall in place, but I've checked the settings and nothing seems to be enabled. That said, I'm not terribly well-versed in this stuff. As well, the local tech support guy gave my computer a thorough once-over and can't figure out the problem.

Any ideas? For what it's worth, I've used both Gmail and Facebook in Canada and elsewhere on this computer with no problems.

Why don't my proxies work anymore?

msbrauer — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:08:00 -0800

Why have my proxies (Privoxy and GAppProxy) suddenly quit working? I'm using an up-to-date Vista installation. I use proxies periodically to get past China's Great Firewall. In the past, a strategy of Tor (by means of Vidalia/Privoxy/Torbutton) and GAppProxy (through FoxyProxy, set up using these instructions). I never use the two at the same time, i.e. if I'm using Tor, I'm not using GAppProxy, and vice versa. When I was last in China, in July, I had been using this setup for a few months with no problems.

I've just returned to China, and after a day or two of flawless operation, both proxies have quit working. To clarify, both proxy setups manage to get past the Great Firewall and transfer data. However, within a few seconds of data transfer through the proxy, I get a message from windows stating, "Privoxy has stopped working" or "HTTP Proxy. 127.0.0.1:8000 has stopped working" in the case of GAppProxy. Privoxy is running on port 8118.

Restarting the computer or the proxies doesn't solve the problem. Running one without the other doesn't solve the problem. Is there a possibility that something other than my computer is causing the problem, perhaps new strategies used by the Great Firewall spike the proxy somehow? The proxies remain operational if they are not in use, which is to say, if I start Privoxy or GAppProxy and don't transfer data through them, the services run with no problem.

While I haven't installed any internet-using programs in the week I've been back in China, since I didn't use the proxies for two months while outside of China, I can't be sure that the problem is a result of new conditions.

How can I troubleshoot this problem?

Proxy? VPN? How can I fool download services into thinking I'm from the USA?

GilloD — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:01:23 -0800

Proxies, VPNs and restrictions, oh my! How can an American dude in South Korea get his Hulu, Steam and Direct2Drive on. More inside. I'm an American dude who is living in South Korea, as you can tell from my recent AskMeFi history. Here's a new kink: I got this sweet, sweet gaming laptop. I like to play games. And unlike other dudes, I like to pay for them. I have the $ to spend, I like to support the safe, lgal alternative to piracy.

Problem: I can't spend it. Many Steam games aren't available outside the US. Same with Direct2Drive. The vast majority of titles aren't purchasable with a Korean credit card. More, if I try to use my American card I get a warning like "The billing address you're using doesn't match the country you're buying from".

So, ugh. I thought we all liked capitalism and here I am trying to spend money and I literally CANNOT GIVE IT AWAY. Recently I've had friends 'Gift' me the game which lifts this restriction, but I feel bad putting them on the spot.

So: Proxy? Proxies are slow, yeah? Are there pay-for proxies that are quicker? WHat about VPNs? What are my options for tricking websites into thinking I'm coming from the US. I'm not against shelling out a monthly fee to have access to a service like this. Suggestions?

Looking for a professional web-based proxy service.

falameufilho — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:03:34 -0800

Looking for a professionally run web-based proxy service to test localization and internationalization of a web site. There are a million proxy services available today, all of them targeted at people who want to watch Hulu from outside the US or the BBC iPlayer from outside the UK. I don't need that - I am looking for a very simple one that I am willing to pay for. Let me describe what I want and please tell me if it exists!

I am testing localization and internationalization for a product. To quickly check if things are working as planned, I'd like to go to a web page that would let me enter a URL on a form field, select a country, click submit and I would see that URL as someone accessing the internet from that country would see it.

For example, if I enter http://google.com and select Singapore, I'd see the Google Singapore home page.

Bonus points if:

* 100-plus country in the selection list
* Supports SSL
* Proxy forwards my user agent along with my request, so I can use different browsers
* Premium, professionally run service with top-notch availability and customer service

Feel free to discuss non-web-based solutions (Tor, etc), but they are more complex to implement and since I am behind a very restrictive proxy, it might not work for me.

how to watch hulu in europe?

thedoctorpants — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:44:27 -0800

HULU voodoo... American but not in the US. I am an American living in a Scandinavian country. I want to watch HULU and other region specific sites using PLEX with a mac mini. Is there something free or a relatively cheap proxy (fast!) I can use to get all the shows I want and ditch this crap Viasat?

I have seen previous questions and answers here. I have to add more...

Also, I will be traveling to the US soon. My folks have FIOS. COuld I set up a proxy there using an old computer? If so, how?

TIA!

ET Phone Home

Funmonkey1 — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:36:40 -0800

VPS and Internet Proxy: I have a VPS and want to be able to access the internet remotely from it. For example, the VPS is hosted in Scandinavia while I am in USA, how do I create a proxy server so I can access internet through the VPS country? Reasons for doing this are simple. While traveling there is country only content I can't access from abroad. Much like Hulu isn't available outside US.

I figure there must be a simple script or some type of settings I can use, but my google-fu isn't coming up with any good results.

VPS is Linux based, SSL enabled, etc....Perl, PGP, Python -- you name it, it is supported.

Voulez-vous loadez mon site avec moi?

Billegible — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:38:02 -0800

InternetQAfilter: how can I test my site as if it were being loaded from other countries? We have a webapp that we're selling to various clients in various countries. Every now and then we get a report from a demo'er about problems with the site that we can't replicate here, which we suspect might be due to an infinitesimal increase in load-lag across the long interwebnet pipes across the ocean. And yes, there are also other possibilities such as unique firewalls, poor net connections at demo locations, etc., but we have to eliminate each element separately before we can be absolutely sure there's nothing to fix in homebase.
I'd like to find some kind of proxy that would load the site for me as from France, Japan, etc., i.e. loaded from our home server via whatever path it then takes to arrive there.
The internet being what it is, I assume there must already exist some such tool or site. Does anyone know of one? How do you test your web apps in similar circumstances?

Global Proxy in Ubuntu with SOCKS and ssh

SpiffyRob — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:53:42 -0800

Global SOCKS5 Proxy in Ubuntu? (Or, MacOS/Widnows:Proxifier :: Linux:???) I’m a recent Ubuntu adoptee, and have enjoyed solving the issues that come up in the switching as much as the OS itself, but this one seems to have me stymied. Basically, I’m looking for a way to set things up such that every single network connection goes through an SSL tunnel.

A basic bit of background: In either Mac OS or Windows, I’ve accomplished this exact thing by doing the following:

1. I have a remote server configured to be used as a SOCKS5 proxy.
2. I use the following command to direct all traffic sent to localhost:1080(127.0.0.1) on to my remote server:
ssh –ND 1080 user@server.com –p 80

Where –N is used to show no confirmation after I enter the password, -D directs all traffic to 1080, and –p makes the ssh connection over port 80. (One of the few ports unblocked by my home ISP.)

3. Once that is connected, I use proxifier to direct all network traffic to localhost:1080.

This works perfectly for both setups. The thing I like best about it is that it directs *all* network traffic through Proxifier, and I can exempt things as needed. This is much, much simpler than configuring individual applications, and is invaluable for applications that don’t support SOCKS5 out of the box.

SO! The question: Does an alternative to proxifier exist for Linux? Some googling reveals that this same question has been asked, but in the rare instance that it’s been answered, the answerer didn’t seem to grok what proxifier did. The one thing that I’ve found, GSTM seems like it should do the trick, but I’ve yet to have any success.

Please note: While I will certainly entertain alternate methods to what I’m doing, they would need to follow two criteria:
1. I can do it without touching my remote server’s configuration. (Don’t want to mess up the already-working solutions I have for Windows/Mac.)
2. It must allow for stuff that doesn’t support SOCKS5 natively to run through a proxy.

Thanks in advance!

Diplomacy in absence

cmonkey — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:13:58 -0800

When an embassy acts as a proxy, representing the interests of a third country, what kind of compensation is made to them? The US has asked Sweden to check on the status of two arrested journalists in North Korea, because the US does not have diplomatic contact there, and the Swiss represented US interests in Cuba for a while. What do countries like Sweden or Switzerland get out of such an arrangement, and is there a formal term for this?

Avoiding "not available in your country" messages

alby — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:16:08 -0800

I'm sick of "not available in your country" messages. What's the best workaround? I've tried looking for proxies but I can never seem to find a decent one and when I do find one that works (briefly) changing back and forth is a real pain. I'm using Firefox so I'm sure that one of the proxy-switching plugins is what I'm looking for - which ones work best? Where's the best place to find usable proxies that'll work for what I want them to do?

Surfing in Tehran

milagu — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:25:36 -0800

My friend is in Iran and wants to get through to blocked internet sites on her Mac. Does anyone have any experience doing this through a proxy? So far nothing she has tried has worked.

Scrabble on Lexulous?

rikschell — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:50:01 -0800

Has anyone in the US or Canada succeeded in using a proxy server to play a regulation-style Scrabble game on Lexulous? Is there any other way?

Murphy strikes! SSH proxying is broken just as firewall goes up

your mildly obsessive average geek — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:25:01 -0800

In a classic demonstration of Murphy's Law, the SSH service on my VPS server is not proxying requests on the same day that a network firewall was installed. Please help! Here are the details (sorry if the rest of the question sounds a bit frantic...)

1. I have a client PC running Windows XP SP2 from which I access sites running non-default ports (Cpanel, Webmin etc.) via a SSH proxy.

2. The SSH proxy is running on a separate server. I use the Tunnelier software to provide proxy services. I log into the SSH service using a unprivileged account (account has no sudo access etc.)

3. The VPS Server running the SSH daemon is on CentOS 5, OpenSSH_4.3p2

4. The server does not have any firewall running (although CSF is installed):

# ps aux | grep csf
root 24232 0.0 0.1 1752 488 pts/0 S+ 20:03 0:00 grep csf
# ps aux | grep iptables
root 24278 0.0 0.1 1752 488 pts/0 S+ 20:03 0:00 grep iptables

5. The contents of my sshd_config file can be seen here

I can log into the SSH service successfully, however whenever I try to go to any website on the client, the SSH proxy log shows:

10:08:31.031 Closing SOCKS5 connection from 128.236.48.58:1753, sent: 0, received: 0.

10:08:31.031 SOCKS5 connection from 128.236.48.58:1753 failed: Client connection closed before completion of protocol.

10:08:34.034 Closing SOCKS5 connection from 128.236.48.58:1754, sent: 0, received: 0.

10:08:34.034 SOCKS5 connection from 128.236.48.58:1754 failed: Client connection closed before completion of protocol.

The log is filled with these sort of failed connections.

Further details:

1. The SSH proxy server isn't running any firewall, neither is the client.
2. The network does not block port 22 at the firewall for the SSH proxy server.
3. I have a second much slower SSH connection on the same server, and proxying through this second account works. So that tells me it's not a problem on my network end, it's the SSH server.
4. I have tried to log on to the SSH service using a high privilege account (sudo su access enabled) and then proxying, but that doesn't work either.

Any ideas, suggestions?

How can I access a website that times out unless I go through an anonymous proxy server?

skinnydipp — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:07:57 -0800

Suddenly, I can access a certain website from this computer only through an anonymous proxy server. How can I change this? I have not logged in through the proxy as I'm not sure if that's kosher, but I can see the log in page. Otherwise I get a server taking to long to respond message. I've cleared cookies and flushed DNS entries and tried firefox and IE. (do you know Andre T?)

Using Apache to (almost) bypass Apache?

holgate — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:18:20 -0800

Is there a simple way to use Apache's ProxyPass directive so that everything apart from a directory beneath the webroot gets passed on to another server? If not, can it be done another way? I'm wanting to combine lighttpd with Apache to take some load of a server, but unlike the standard ProxyPass setup, I'd like the httpd.conf to direct things like this:

http://mysite.com/ -> lighttpd running on port 81
http://mysite.com/foo/ -> Apache running on port 80

Is that possible with ProxyPass? If not, can it be done another way, perhaps by swapping the ports and putting it in the lighttpd config?

How can others see my computer?

tinbigd — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 03:20:07 -0800

Our companies IT department can proxy into my computer from1500 miles away and see what I have on it and make changes etc. How does this work? Is it a software program or more a matter of them identifying their computer with the same information (you know, that number that all computers have , their address?) as mine?

Proxy/VPN services for watching Hulu outside of US

sdis — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:57:27 -0800

Proxy/VPN recommendations for using Hulu outside of the US? (Non-free options welcome) Hotspot Shield is cool, but is awfully slow for streaming video. Any recommendations on a fast proxy or VPN service?

Heard good things about WiTopia, but figured I'd try and get a few other recommendations before jumping for that one.

problem apps ignoring proxy settings

tylermoody — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:11:02 -0800

Why are Firefox and Transmission ignoring my proxy settings? OS X 10.5.4 I'm connecting to a server through ssh with:
ssh -D -p name@server

In System Preferences > Network > Advanced > Proxies, I have a SOCKS proxy set at localhost:. This setup successfully sends most of my traffic through the remote server, but Firefox can occasionally get around it (when watching Hulu) and Transmission connects directly to other peers (connections to the tracker go through the proxy, though). \

I've tried setting the proxy options of those applications independently, but I don't see any change in their behavior. What's letting them get around the system-level configuration, and what can I do to enforce proper behavior? I'm open to other proxy setups, this was the simplest I'd found.

How do you get around censorware?

Grod — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:03:03 -0800

I've started a new job where they use *sense, the well known censorware. To me it's like a tooth ache, I can't stop poking at it. I forwarded my gmail to a 'me@mydomain.com' email account hosted by dreamhost, but a week later web* is blocking it. I set up CGIPROXY on a server, but *sense knows about it. I've tried PHPPROXY, but gmail won't load through it. What is a reliable, invisible, way around the damn thing? The filter doesn't accomplish what it is supposedly in place to accomplish. I've wasted more time trying to circumvent it than I ever would have checking my email at lunch. I can read MeFi, BoingBoing, and Digg, the three biggest time wasters I know.

It's insulting, I'm not about to pirate movies, download viruses, or browse porn sites. It's inconvenient, I can't download the dev version of tab mix plus because the site that hosts it is blocked. I can download the version available on the Firefox add-ons site, but that doesn't work with Firefox 3.

But mostly it's insulting. Help me thumb my nose at it.

How do I access the internet through an ISA Server proxy?

mr_silver — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:15:31 -0800

I have an application installed on my PC at work that needs to connect to the internet through our ISA Server. The problem it has is that it can't connect directly unless I put in proxy settings. The problem that I have is that the proxy setting is just one long URL with no username or password. How can I get this application to connect? Whenever I connect to the internet with a browser (IE and Firefox) on the work computer (Windows XP) I need to use http://isa.uk.mycompany.com:8080/array.dll?Get.Routing.Script as the automatic proxy configuration URL in the preferences otherwise it refuses to connect.

The application I want to connect to the internet uses HTTP and gives me three options for the proxy: "use default", "direct" and "named proxy". "Use default" and "direct" don't work.

"Named proxy" requires me to enter a proxy server, username and password. I'm guessing that my windows username and password would be for the latter two, but I have no idea what to put for the proxy server.

I've tried putting the long URL in, but that doesn't work. The problem appears to be that it is expecting a server name, not a port number and certainly not a path to a script.

I tried pasting the URL into a browser and it downloaded what looked to be about 300 lines of VB Script. There was nothing in there that gave me much of a clue on what I should use. I also tried running the VB script from the command line but nothing was outputted.

Can anyone offer any insights into what I need to do to work out what the proxy server name would be? Failing that, what else can I do?

Bypassing my work proxy.

PowerCat — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:59:32 -0800

My work is boring and I wish I could have access to facebook and flickr. Is there a way I can run a software on my machine to let me access facebook?
Right now I just VNC in my PC and open firefox.
But back in the days I had this "analogx port mapper" that would let me map an address to a specific port, but that was years ago at school and it doesn't work now.

Is it safe to use proxy servers from public lists on the web?

leticia — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:59:21 -0800

I am outside the US but would like to watch some online TV episodes from US networks websites. I have found many lists of US-based proxy servers online that I could try, but I am concerned about security -- would using such a proxy server make me more vulnerable to viruses, worms, spam, and/or other such things? Many thanks.