Set Up A Socks Proxy With Your Seedbox or Linux Shell

[Wilhelm]

27 July, 2013 By

 

Aside from being able to leech, seed, and download stuff with amazing speeds, seedboxes can also be used to by-pass restrictive networks as in the case of most university or workplace connections. This tutorial will walk you through the steps in setting up a SOCKS proxy in your Windows machine using your seedbox or linux shell.

This tutorial is meant for educational purposes only. Setuix Solutions cannot be held liable should you choose to use this method to do anything illegal or visit websites that you are not supposed to.

In order to use a seedbox based proxy, an SSH client is required to connect to the server. Various SSH clients are available for Windows, the most common of them are Bitvise and PuTTY which are both free for personal usage. Steps on how to configure the aforementioned clients will be covered in this tutorial. Provided below are the download links for Bitvise and PuTTY.

Download Bitvise | Download PuTTY

After the installation of the SSH client of your choice, the next step is configuration. The installation process of the SSH clients are not covered in this tutorial.

Bitvise Method

In the Login tab, start with the Server section and key in your server IP in the Host box. Unless specified by your server, the default Port used is 22.

In the Authentication section, type your SSH credentials in the Username and Password boxes. Bitvise provides various methods of password input that can be revealed by exploring the drop-down menu in the Initial method option.

Next, proceed to the Options tab. Here, you can customize the client based on your preference.

The Reconnection section deals with the behavior of the client when connection is lost. You can set it to the option that best suits you. The On Login section provides options for the features i.e. terminal, SFTP client, and remote desktop, that will be automatically loaded upon login.

All these are set by default and are optional, however it is better to set them to the values that can optimize your session.

After that, proceed to the Services tab. You have to check the Enabled box and set the Listen Interface to  127.0.0.1. The value for the Listen Port is set to 1080 by default but can be customized, like in image below. The Server Bind Interface can be left as it is.

Setting up the FTP-to-SFTP Bridge section is optional. You will want to enable it if your FTP client of choice does not support SFTP.

If you plan to use this configuration for your future sessions, you can keep the settings by clicking the Save profile button in the leftmost panel. It will prompt a dialog box where you can set the profile name for your convenience.

Finally, you are now ready to start your tunnelling client, just press Login.

On your first login session, a Host Key Verification window will appear. This is normal and you can choose either to Accept it for successive sessions or only for this specific session.

After this, you can now leave the Bitvise open or minimized.

PuTTy Method

Go to the Session category and in the Host Name box, enter your server IP. The Port can be specified, however by default, it is set to 22.

To facilitate convenience, you can keep the settings for future use. All you have to do is to make a Saved Session, named as you prefer, and hit the Save button on the right.

Next, scroll down the Category tree and select Connection, and then SSH. Expand the SSH sub-category by clicking the “+” symbol and select the Tunnels category. As seen in the image above, this is the Options controlling SSH port forwarding.

Input the Source port value (usually 8888 or 8080) in its respective box and press the Add button. Leave the Destination box blank, and select Dynamic. You can force your session to use IPv4 or IPv6, but by default it is set to Auto.

You are now ready to start PuTTY. However, if you plan to reuse the same settings in the future, you can save the session by going back to the Session category and clicking on the session name you made earlier (e.g. Cocoa) and hitting the save button.

After this, you can now finally start and click Open.

A terminal window will pop out and you will be asked for your SSH credentials starting off from your username and then password. If you key-in the correct details, your server banner (if available) will show. You can now leave PuTTY in background or you can minimize it.

How to set up SSH tunneling on your browser

Now that the SSH Tunneling client is running in background, you will now have to customize your browser in order to visit websites via your proxy. For this tutorial, the internet browser used is Mozilla Firefox. Other browsers such as Chrome and Opera can also be utilized. Also, you can just configure a certain browser to use your proxy, while another browser will use your native (home/work, etc.) connection.

By default, Firefox disables hostname/DNS resolution. You can enable it by typing about:config in the address bar. Search for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and right click the result and select Toggle.

Next, go to the Firefox ribbon and select Options. In the Advanced header, proceed to the Network tab and click on theSettings… button in Connection section. The Connection Settings window will then appear.

Here, select the Manual proxy configuration option in the Configure Proxies to Access the Internet section. Enter127.0.0.1 (as used in your SSH client) in the SOCKS Host box and the same Port you used in your SSH client. You can select either SOCKS v4 or V5 then click OK. You are now ready to surf the internet using your proxy.

If you want to specify the sites upon which your proxy will be used, you can use the Firefox Add-on, FoxyProxy.

Download FoxyProxy

After installation, you will have to turn on FoxyProxy by clicking its logo located beside the address bar and Add New Proxy.

Like in the browser menu without the add-on, you have to choose the Manual Proxy Configuration option under the Proxy Details tab. Type 127.0.0.1 (as used in your SSH client) in the Host or IP Address box and the same Port used in your SSH client. You have to tick the SOCKS proxy box and select between SOCKS v4/4a or V5. Then click OK and you can now surf the internet using your proxy.

Like in browsers, you have to configure your torrent client in order to leech and seed through your proxy. In this tutorial, the client used is utorrent. Go to Preferences and then select the Connection section from the tree. In the Proxy Serversection, select Socks5 (or 4) in the Type dropdown menu. Enter 127.0.0.1 (as used in your SSH client) in the Proxy box and the same Port used in your SSH client. Click Apply and then OK, and you can now start torrenting.

For those that use Download Managers such as Internet Download Manager (IDM) for downloading files, you can also set these applications to use your proxy when downloading. For IDM, go to the Downloads menu and select Options. The IDM Configuration window will appear. Click on the Proxy/Socks tab and check the Use socks box and enter the appropriate values.

For further convenience, go to the Site Logins tab and click New to add your site credentials. You can use this for http, https, ftp, or mms transactions as seen in the dropdown menu in the Site login window. Just provide the correct log-in information in their respective fields.