SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

I am familiar with tunnelling securely back to my home computer using PuTTy and Firefox. That way I can be away from home but still surf quite securely.

I'd like to do something similar with the N800, but don't know of any browsers available that support SOCKS. I downloaded Minimo, but it only has one field in which to enter a proxy. I assume that's just a http proxy.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

I would love an answer to this problem, too. Perhaps one is somewhere else in the forums, and we just haven't uncovered it yet.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

I haven't used socks other than indirectly, but still.. it looks like it might be possible to do with the help of the 'privoxy' proxy and an external socks proxy. However, it'll have to be socks4a then I believe.

So, what you would have to do to try this is:
1) Install privoxy on the N800
2) Edit its /etc/privoxy/config file to have the following:
where 'nnnn' is the port number (e.g. 9050). Note the space and the dot ('.') at the end of the line.
3) Make sure that's the only non-commented 'forward' line in the config file.
4) Set up a network configuration on the N800 which uses proxy, set it to 127.0.0.1 and 8118 (which is privoxy running locally on the N800)
5) In principle the N800 privoxy proxy should now forward through your external socks4a-compatible proxy.
6) Note that I've never used socks proxies other than indirectly, and that was through privoxy like described above.. I don't actually know how it's supposed to work from there, so the assumptions I'm making above that you could/would go through an external socks proxy/server may be rubbish for all I know..

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

Thanks! I'll give it a shot later today.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

Dynamic port forwarding with SSH (that is, ssh -D 8080 user@somehost) can be used to simulate a local socks proxy at localhost:8080 - search my posts for a similar one I put up just like 5 minutes ago about this :)

This is essentially the same as using Putty on Windows to do the SOCKS proxy thing - you just need openssh installed, as well as a terminal to run the command in.

Ryan

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

As I posted in the other thread. All of what you say is fine, but you still need a browser that is capable of utilising a socks proxy. For example, on Windows, Opera does not support SOCKS. Mozilla Firefox does. As yet I have not found a browser for the N800 that can do this.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

What I suggested was to point Opera or MicroB to a proxy (privoxy running on the N800) which converts to socks4a for you.. wouldn't that work? It works for my (admittedly not general) use case at least.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

Using privoxy seems an easy solution.

I've also recompiled http://packages.debian.org/lenny/tsocks on the n800. It took me around 3mn to recompile and package but I have no way to check if it works (haven't even tried installing it actually but I don't see why it wouldn't). I can put it on a webserver if somebody is interested.
Wget would be the easiest to try as it can be launched from cli.

LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libtsocks.so.1.8 wget http://www.google.com
This should transparently redirect all socket operations to the libtsocks that would socksifies wget.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

I'd be interested in trying it out, free, if you want to make it available.

Re: SOCKS5 Proxy and N800
 

Hi folks,

I just managed to get the MicroB browser engine on the N800 to work with ssh proxy. It is a bit of a pain to set up, but it works.

First, in your xterminal, type (replacing me@myhost.com with your own SSH host -- this can even be a Linux router with SSH enabled, like my WRT54GL running DD-WRT)

ssh me@myhost.com -D 3210

You should have to type your password of course, and then you'll get the remote prompt.

You must have the MicroB browser engine installed. Open your browser. in the URL address bar, type:

about:config

Now you get a page that, if you use Firefox, should look somewhat familiar. At the top, there are two fields. One says, "Name" and the other one says, "Value". I will give the name and the value of each thing you need to add below. The name is followed by a space and the value:

network.proxy.socks localhost
network.proxy.socks_port 3210
network.proxy.type 1


I had values in my http proxy fields that were screwing things up for me. If the above doesn't work, try leaving the value blank for these two names:


network.proxy.http
network.proxy.http_port


You know it's working if you go to a site that tells you your IP address (like http://staff.washington.edu/corey/info.cgi ) and it tells you the remote computer's address.

If you want to proxy your IM, it is a lot easier. Just use Pidgin, it has SOCKS proxy support built-in and accessible from the menu.

Alan

IMPORTANT UPDATE: If you close your browser and re-open it, you stop using the proxy! The good news is that the browser doesn't forget your proxy settings, it just sets the network.proxy.type to 0. It's a bit of a pain, but it is fairly easy to "fix," you have to go to about:config and put network.proxy.type in Name and 1 in Value and then submit it.

UPDATE 2: You can just bookmark the about:config page after you have submitted the network.proxy.type and then just click on the bookmark to set it again. I named the bookmark "Turn on proxy"