PrivateInternetAccess SOCKS Proxy Tutorial

PrivateInternetAccess SOCKS Proxy Tutorial – Introduction

In a previous series of articles we looked at how to use Squid Proxy to overcome the five devices maximum limit when subscribed to the PrivateInternetAccess VPN anonymising service. While this is useful when needing to browse anonymously, it doesn’t help when using other non-HTTP protocols  e.g. FTP, SMTP, SSH so to that end we present this PrivateInternetAccess SOCKS Proxy tutorial.

To this end, we need to employ a SOCKS (sockets) proxy: A SOCKS proxy is a general purpose proxy server that establishes a TCP connection to another server on behalf of a client and then routes all the traffic back and forth between the client and the server. It works for any kind of network protocol on any port.

In this tutorial we will be building on parts of the previous tutorial but using the Dante SOCKS proxy instead of Squid.

We will be using:

• Debian Wheezy netinstall ISO
  • OpenVPN – to create our VPN connection
  • dante – to proxy specific traffic or applications through the VPN

Our network diagram for this example is as follows:

The client is sitting on the 172.16.16.0 network and accessing the proxy in the DMZ 192.168.101.0 subnet. Outgoing traffic will then be routed out through the VPN interface (tun0) encrypted and anonymised.