hide ip, vpn or proxy?

R

rblon

I want to be able to web browse using a Windows machine through my FreeBSD server when I'm at another location (ie not the same internal network). Main reason is to hide my location / ip address.

It seems I can use a VPN server or a proxy server. I'm wondering if someone can give advice. And what would be a good vpn or proxy server for this purpose.
 
rblon said:
I want to be able to web browse using a Windows machine through my FreeBSD server when I'm at another location (ie not the same internal network). Main reason is to hide my location / ip address.

It seems I can use a VPN server or a proxy server. I'm wondering if someone can give advice. And what would be a good vpn or proxy server for this purpose.
Click to expand...
A VPN server would be the best solution but not the easiest. Having a proxy server open to the world is not an ideal scenario.
 
If your external location has a fixed IP address you can instruct a proxy server only to allow that particular IP address, or turn on authentication. If you are on dynamic IP addresses, VPN is easier.
 
I do want to use authentication. And, the external location has a fixed ip address so I would use the firewall as well to provide security.

What would be a good VPN server?
 
rblon said:
I do want to use authentication. And, the external location has a fixed ip address so I would use the firewall as well to provide security.

What would be a good VPN server?
Click to expand...
OpenVPN server is very popular.
 
I have used a similar setup before. I setup a proxy server (using apache) and bound the proxy to only listen to localhost:8118. I then used SSH to tunnel my proxy traffic. I found this to be the simplest solution as many workplaces will deny outbound VPN traffic since it is a security risk. It also used software that I already had installed on my work machine (PuTTY) and server (Apache).
 
gordon@ said:
I have used a similar setup before. I setup a proxy server (using apache) and bound the proxy to only listen to localhost:8118. I then used SSH to tunnel my proxy traffic.
Click to expand...
No need for a local proxy.

$ ssh -D8080 [email]me@home.example.com[/email]

Log in and set your browser to use http://localhost:8080 as a SOCKS5 proxy.
 
Sorry for my ignorance, but could you explain a bit more how this would work?

Does this need any server running on the FreeBSD machine?
Can I use Putty with the -D option?
 
That sounds very simple, but I am not getting it to work.

So I set up my browser to use http://localhost:8080 as a SOCKS5 proxy.

Now before establishing SSH connection, I get following error (as expected):

Code: 
Error 130 (net::ERR_PROXY_CONNECTION_FAILED): Proxy server connection failed.

Now when I use Putty to start SSH connection using Dynamic port forwarding, I get the following, which is not very informative:

Code: 
Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): Unknown error.

I am not sure about the "Tunnels" settings (see screenshot), but I have tried variations and I get the same. Any ideas what might be wrong?
 

Attachments

  • PuTTY Tunnels.JPG
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Remove the two ticked settings at the top, you don't need them.
 
I basically have my normal PuTTY session (standard settings, SSH using port 22). I go to Tunnels, type Source port "8080", select "Dynamic" (see screenshot), and press "Add". Then I press "Open", and log in.

In the browser I try to open a standard http page. I don't think any blocking on the FreeBSD machine should take place (firewall allows outbound traffic on port 80). Any analyzing I can do on the Windows machine? netstat command gives me:

Code: 
TCP WINMACHINE:8080 localhost:2104 TIME_WAIT
TCP WINMACHINE:8080 localhost:2105 TIME_WAIT
TCP WINMACHINE:8080 localhost:2106 TIME_WAIT
....

after I tried connecting to a website.
 

Attachments

  • PuTTY Tunnels 2.JPG
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