Personal Proxy Server

[silenthunder]

I just so happen to have an old server motherboard and chipset, and I have a feeling that if I bought some RAM for it, it just might work..
I want to have my own personal proxy server for me to use, if it does work. I'm not looking for a full tutorial, I can figure out how to do things on my own, but I want to know what OS I should use on it and roughly how to go about setting up a proxy on it. Is there any tools for creating one or a way to set on up from scratch on the OS?

[ande]

I just so happen to have an old server motherboard and chipset, and I have a feeling that if I bought some RAM for it, it just might work..
I want to have my own personal proxy server for me to use, if it does work. I'm not looking for a full tutorial, I can figure out how to do things on my own, but I want to know what OS I should use on it and roughly how to go about setting up a proxy on it. Is there any tools for creating one or a way to set on up from scratch on the OS?

Honestly, the easiest would be to run a minimal Debian with a perl script running socks4/5. But I am sure you can go more hardcore if you like, but there arent really and (good) advantages using a day configuring some commercial super proxy that probably has flaws in it.

If you want a VPN solutions there are a ton of tutorials out there on how to configure VPN on *nix.

[silenthunder]

It's not the fact that I need a proxy that I want to set one up, it's just something for me to work on. I do wanna go hardcore on it and spend months working out all the bugs just to say that I did it. I'll check out the easy Debian method first to see what it's like and to have something up and running for the time being, but once I get time on my hands I wanna make it a half-heartedly serious project. The mobo is some kind of Compaq from 1997 and its got what appears to be a 16-bit Intel processor with 3 RAM slots. I'll post pics if interested..even if I don't get anything to run on it, it's a nice piece of history.

[proxx]

Or you could just run something as SQUID
However running sshd and using at as a tunnel is much more secure(Full traffic encryption) and portable.
Nor do you have to worry about securing it as SSH is pretty much as secure as it gets.


A snippet from man ssh;

 -D [bind_address:] port
              Specifies a local ``dynamic'' application-level port forwarding.  This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side, optionally
              bound to the specified bind_address.   When‐
              wayPorts setting.  However, an explicit bind_address may be used to bind the connection to a specific address.  The bind_address of
              ``localhost'' indicates that the listening port be bound for

[lucid]

I'll check out the easy Debian method first

A more minimalist OS that is simple and Debian based would be Crunchbang. Try it out.

[silenthunder]

I'll look into both of those OS's and see what I think based on what the internet has to say..however running SSH sounds pretty good too..