Access the blocked websites [facebook, orkut, youtube] using free http proxy servers

Atlast that too happened. Ban  for facebook on the computer lab,  Damn proxyserver !! They first blocked youtube, then orkut, then torrents and now it's facebook's turn... Then how do a man live without all this things in such a technically overflooding world?

I can't agree with their policies... I want to talk, i want to chat and i want to tweet.. Squid proxy server was running on the network. It was powerful and configured well to block everything out of the rule. Then i started googling for a way to bring the blocked facebook onto my laptop within the same network, and found that some free http proxy servers outside the network will help me.Also port 80 (HTTP) was open, so that i can browse the internet.

What actually happens in the network when i am behind my college's proxy server is, whenever a url request for facebook comes from my browser, the proxy server which has been configured to capture such requests comes into action. But since we are allowed to browse on the internet, its clear that you can access servers other than facebook. Most of the free http proxy mechanisms work on this trick. They help you to cheat the squid server. Squid server beleive that your machine and the free proxy server  on the internet (may be in US, Europe ) are the two endpoints of communication. See the image below to see how that http proxy server loads the facebook page on your machine  [check the url area and the content area in the image]

Here the free http proxy server (faceoxy.com in image) communicate with the facebook server on behalf of you and serves the packets from the facebook within faceoxy's header. That was somewhat literally!!!  So when the squid program analyses the packets, it can not find any traces of the facebook in the source/destination address feilds of the ip packets. I am not going to the advanced details of http tunneling, another post is on its way...

List of the free and reliable http proxy servers that help you to access blocked websites such as facebook, orkut, youtube etc.. are : Though they are classified most of the sites serves facilities such as 

• anonymous browsing
• proxy bypassing
• changing network location of your machine

HideMyAss.com – Free Anonymous Proxy Servers

Proxy.org – Directory of free proxy servers.

GlobalPandora – They give you a proxy address to add to your browsers netwrok settings

http://blockedsiteaccess.com/


 
facebook  



http://facebookoxy.com/

http://www.faceoxy.com/



youtube proxy


Megabypass

Youtubeproxy

MegaProxy 

proxybin.com
 

Another best trick that works well with these condition is the foxyproxy addon for firefox. Just install the addon for your firefox. FoxyProxy automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns. Simply, it automates the manual process of editing Firefox's Connection Settings dialog. Proxy server switching occurs based on the loading URL and the switching rules you define...

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Complete reference to SSH tunnelling

an introduction . . .

In simple words tunneling is a method of bypassing firewall or proxy restrictions using some tunnelling protocols. It works by creating a "tunnel", or a communications channel that makes the firewall think that it is getting traffic from a web browser. Communications content is delivered through this tunnel to our gateway or your own personal gateway. The gateway extracts your content from the tunnel and sends it to the destination. When your counter party responds everything goes back the same way. Tunnelling can be used when your company, college, university, ISP blocked certain programs, FTP, telnet.

On the other hand, tunneling can also allow inherently insecure protocols to cross your firewall. For this reason, it may be advantageous to use a firewall solution that does content based checking of HTTP connections, so that you can disallow connections that are actually tunneling other protocols. This can be quite difficult to do. SSH tunnelling techniques have a wide range of applications among the other tunnelling protocols.  

SSH tunnelling ...

To set up an SSH tunnel, one configures an SSH client to forward a specified local port to a port on the remote machine. Once the SSH tunnel has been established, the user can connect to the specified local port to access the network service. For setting up the ssh application in your machine please  read my previous post from here

A Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel consists of an encrypted tunnel created through an SSH protocol connection. Users may set up SSH tunnels to transfer unencrypted traffic over a network through an encrypted channel.

Configuring the ssh tunnel

X11 forwarding

Ubuntu comes with X11 forwarding facility for the server. We have to enable for the current session only on the client side using the following command 

$ ssh –X  user@myserver

To enable X11 forwarding permanently, you should edit the file ssh_config as sudo  as follows

    $ sudo gedit /etc/ssh/ssh_config

     # for all users, add the line ForwardX11 yes

     # To enable it permanently for a specific user 

         only, add the line to that user’s ~.ssh/config file.
 

Once that setting has been added, the -X option is no longer required to use X11 Tunneling. Run ssh command to connect to the remote system as you would normally. 

To test that the tunneling is working, run xclock after ssh’ing into the remote machine, and it should appear on your client desktop.Thus SSH Tunneling is an excellent way to securely use remote graphical tools!

Logging in Remotely with ssh

To securely log in to a remote host, you can use either of two different syntaxes to specify the user name:

$ ssh -l  user  myserver

or

$ ssh user@myserver

 

Accessing SSH on a Different Port

For security purposes, a remote host may have its SSH service listening a different port than the default port number 22. If that’s the case, use -p option to ssh to contact that service:

$ ssh -p 12345 user@myserver.com

[Connect to SSH on port 12345]

Applications

One of the important advantage of the SSH is that you can forward any TCP port with SSH. This is a great way to configure secure tunnels quickly and easily. No configuration is required on the server side.

Tunneling for remote X11 Clients  
                   

                Inorder to use applications that are available on a remote machine follow the steps

1.[Start ssh connection to myserver]

$ ssh user@myserver

Then terminal for prompt for the password

2.Run the applications
 

$ echo $DISPLAY    -Show the current X display entry
$ xeyes                  -Show moving desktop eyes
$ gnome-cups-manager     -Configure remote printers
$ gksu services-admin       -Change system services
$ firefox                             -starts the web browser

Tunneling for Remote Printing Administration               

                 Let myserver is a print server with the CUPS printing service’s web-based user interface enabled (running on port 631). That GUI is only accessible from the local machine. We tunnel to that service in myserver from the client pc using ssh with the following options:

$ ssh -L 1234:localhost:631 myserver

This example forwards port 1234 on the client PC to localhost port 631 on the server. We can now browse to http://localhost:1234 on the client PC. This will be redirected to cupsd listening on port 631 on the server.

Tunneling to an Internet Service
 
                 Another example for using SSH tunneling is when your local machine is blocked from connecting to the Internet (using proxies, firewalls ...), you can get to another machine (myserver) that has an Internet connection and utilize its connectivity.

The following example lets you visit the Google.com web site (HTTP, TCP port 80) across an SSH connection to a computer named myserver that has a connection to the Internet:

$ ssh -L 12345:google.com:80 myserver

With this example, any connection to the local port 12345 is directed across an SSH tunnel to myserver, which in turn opens a connection to Google.com port 80. You can now browse to http://localhost:12345 and use myserver as a relay to the Google.com web site. 

Since you’re only using ssh to forward a port and not to obtain a shell on the server, you can add the –N option to prevent the execution of remote commands:

$ ssh -L 12345:google.com:80 –N myserver

 

Tunnelling to use SSH as a SOCKS Proxy 

                 Inorder to utilize the full power of tunnelling the best way is to get your browser traffic out of your local network via an encrypted tunnel is using the SSH built-in SOCKS proxy feature.This will make you anonymous (in ip) in the outside world and let you break through the firewall/proxy restrictions imposed on your network.

$ ssh -D 12345 myserver

The dynamic (-D) option of ssh lets you log in to myserver (as usual). As long as the connection is open, all requests directed to port 12345 are then forwarded to myserver.

Next, set your browser of choice to use localhost port 12345 as a SOCKS v5 proxy. Do not enter anything on the fields for HTTP and other protocols, They all work over SOCKS.

 

Let me conclude...

The SSH tunnelling can be used as a power tool for comunication in environments where limited connectivity is available due to proxies, firewalls and content filtering mechanisms. It provides a secure encrypted channel channel to hide your data from being monitored by anyone. Also the remote access concept will bring your office into your bedroom so that you can login and work on your office machine with your home pc....

Have a nice time in tunnelling ... 

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Links: the browser for the terminal

Links is powerful text WWW browser with tables and frames. It runs in linux terminal providing a faster access to internet especially on slow connection. Its completely text based, so that you cant use it  as a complete replacement for usual browsers since terminal can not display images. Also since text based it can be a used for faster acces of internet when you are using mobile internet. 

 

Installing links in Ubuntu

Take the terminal and type in as follows

 $ sudo apt-get install links 

Or you can download the links package with graphics in compressed format from here. The details about installation are provided in the links site.

 

Browsing in links 

After installation take the terminal and type links

 $ links

 

command line options

-g 

            to run links in graphics mode

-no-g

            to run links in text mode

-anonymous
            Restrict links so that it can run on an anonymous  account.   No local  file  browsing.  No  downloads.  
 
-http-proxy <host:port>
              Host and port number of the HTTP  proxy,  or  blank.

-ftp-proxy <host:port>              
              Host  and  port  number  of  the FTP proxy, or blank. 

-download-dir <path>              
              Default download directory.  (default: actual dir) 

Navigation keys

ESC/F9    menu/escape

d      download link (text mode only)
/       search in the page
?       search back in the page
n       find next match

f        zoom actual frame
^R    reload page
g       go to URL

G       edit the current URL and goto the result
s       bookmark manager
q       quit, close window if more windows are open
=      document informations
\       toggle HTML source/rendered view
 

Setting proxy in links

Select Network Options from the setup menu(Click on F9 to get the menu).

 

Select Proxies to input the proxy address.

 
 

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Internet access and package installation behind a proxy server in Ubuntu

When there is a proxy server in between your system and server you have to specify the proxy address in all the applications that is intended to access internet such as firefox, bittorrent... Proxy servers are mainly deployed for subnets, for example a network inside a college is connected to internet using a proxy server (not technically, since there are gateways,routers...) to sensor and restrict the students internet activities, protect from unauthorized access... 

If you have to run any application behind a proxy server, you have to specify the proxy server address and the port number to the application that need access the internet. This is because the default port numbers used by the transport  layer protocols are changed by the proxy server. Squid is one among the important proxy programs that is prefered by network administrators. In the following cases please replace the proxy address and port number with the corresponding feilds applicable to you.

Setting Proxy address in Mozilla  firefox

Click on edit --> Preferences.

Select the Network tab under the advanced tab. Click on the Settings button. In the Network settings window select the manual configuration. Then enter the HTTP proxy and port on the current window. Save the settings...When you start browsing the firefox will automatically ask for authentication. Then you have to specify the username and password in the proxy server. 

Setting Proxy in Synaptic package manager

If you are using synaptic package manager as the package installer, You have to do some configuration before using apt package manager.

Click on the Settings --> Preferences

Choose the network tab and select manual proxy configuration. Set HTTP proxy and FTP proxy. Then enter their port numbers also. Click on the authentication button to set username and password.

Setting proxy for APT package manager
APT is a command line utility for installing packages. Probably many people are addicted to terminal do the following . . .

If you have no authentication for the proxy server then use the following command line. 

export http_proxy=http://192.168.0.2:3128
export ftp_proxy=http://192.168.0.2:3128

If you have username and password the use

export http_proxy=http://username:password@192.168.0.2:3128/
export ftp_proxy=http://username:password@192.168.0.2:3128/

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