Do you want to get Netflix,Pandora,Hulu and many more country specific content out side USA? Have you ever worried about your government,workplace,school or ISP limitations for web sites? Are you behind Great firewall of china? are you worried about browsing speeds with overloaded or slow web proxy services?
HTTP proxies or the VPNs are the best solution for you. And with squid cache you can make a nice HTTP proxy for your personal or family use.
This is a guide to setup versatile squid as a proxy, It will be password protected as a VPN so its great for personal use . And felt that its delivering blazing fast speed as same as I’m browsing without proxies.
So here is my guide to setup squid as a proxy server on ubuntu or debian for you!
What you will need-
- A VPS or dedicated server with minimum ram of 64MB (64MB of ram will be enough because squid doesn’t eat much ram)
- Debian or Ubuntu installed on your server
- NANO text editor installed on your server ( run “apt-get install nano” to install it if you dont have it already)
Steps-
Install squid on your ubuntu or debian server, issue this command over SSH
apt-get install squid
Then squid is successfully installed and you need to setup squid to access internet because its currently set only for localhost
squid’s config file is huge so we need to find some lines using nano on squid config file.
Issue this commands to open squid config file with NANO text editor.
nano /etc/squid/squid.conf
On there we need to add few new lines to configure this for our personal use.
You can add then on top of the page. those lines are
#Custom Modifications auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/pam_auth auth_param basic children 5 auth_param basic realm Squid proxy-caching web server auth_param basic credentialsttl 4 hours acl password proxy_auth REQUIRED http_access allow password
Here is the squid.conf file after adding those lines
Then
Then on that config file find where it says “http_port 3128” you can use ctrl+w to search for terms. search for http_port 3128 and change 3128 to something you desire. Like 7788
After that http_port XXX line add these
forwarded_for off http_access deny all
So that’s it on server side. To save the changes and exit press ( CTRL + O ) , then ( CTRL + X )
Restart squid to load our new configuration.
restart squid
Thats it folks.
While server side setup complete we need to setup our web browsers to use our proxy. I think you are probably using firefox to browse the web so here is the configuration for firefox for other programs you can use the same.
On firefox navigate to Tools=>Options=>Advanced=>Network=>Settings=>Manual Proxy Configuration
On that page enter your IP address that squid is installed and port as 3128 ( you need to enter the port number that you used when editing squid.conf.) Also click the checkbox “Use this proxy server for all protocols”
Thats it! 🙂
Now when you going to browse the web for the first time it will ask for a user name and password.
The username will be your server root login user name. If you didnt changed it, it will be “root” Password will be your root user password of the server 🙂
Note that
- It will ask for the login everytime you close and reopen your browser. You can choose to save it on the browser
- When choosing a server for setting up squid for your use try to get a server which gives lowest ping times for your location which will help you to browse more fast.
- Also if you want to get netflix , hulu, pandora of course use a United States located VPS or a Dedi.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
Hulu still detect me as a non-US visitor. I use Washington DC IP, and when check to whatismyip.com they said: “Possible Proxy Detected”. What’s wrong?
Thanks. 🙂
Hulu,Netflix , pandroa blacklists major proxy,VPN providors IPS. your DC maybe on of them!
What about tinyproxy ? Did you ever use tinyproxy? I think its even easier to configure on default debian/ubuntu vps templates, just not sure about speed.
Not even heard of it before. But ill give it a try. But im pretty sure that squid has most of the options among them! 🙂
how to uninstall them..?