6 ms·

I don't know if this is helpful, but I'll mention it because it works well for me. I use a Digital Ocean droplet and local forwarding. $ ssh -q -D [port] [dro

I don't know if this is helpful, but I'll mention it because it works well for me. I use a Digital Ocean droplet and local forwarding. $ ssh -q -D [port] [droplet-hostname] Then setup my browser to use a proxy at localhost on [port]. Works great. You can get a "droplet", in Digital Ocean Parlance (i.e., "VPS") for as little as $5/mo, which includes 1TB/mo of data transfer. I assume other options like Linode, Vultr, etc would work as well.

squeaky-clean 7y ago
I actually did this for several years, with the added benefit that any number of my (trusted) friends could piggyback on it, given we weren't all using at once. There are dozens of great guides on this, DigitalOcean even hosts some of their own that you can practically copy paste blindly and be done. I'll be honest though, haha, 10% of my VPN usage is legitimate stuff and 90% is just so I can feel safe streaming things illegally that are otherwise hard to purchase. So I switched over to a third party for the simplicity. If I wanted to do more than avoid an email from my ISP I would definitely go back to rolling my own. (I'm also grandfathered into PIA's older cheaper price tier which makes it easier).
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  >an email from my ISP That's pretty funny. I am from Kazakhstan myself and our largest (pretty much monopolist) internet provider has been encouraging ""piracy"" for as long as I can remember. About 10 years ago a bunch of local media companies (making money from selling badly translated Hollywood movies/video games/etc) lobbied a new law making operating all torrent trackers illegal, and banning access to everything they could find carpet bombing-style. Well, the ban lasted for less than a week, and was lifted after some heavy lobbying by said provider, who was beginning to lose a share of their most valuable customers. Here's another anecdote: in ~2012, when I was getting an FTTH connection, their representative used a popular torrent on my machine to measure the upload/download speeds through the freshly laid cable.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    You're kidding; Kazakhstan has FTTH? I'm in America and still not even close...
    - throwaway8941 7y ago
      Yeah. I pay $10/month for 100 Mb/s with very stable upload and download speeds. You can get 1 Gb/s for $50/mo. I have been serving 10-20 TB each month with no complaints from my provider. But you have to remember that we make something like 5-10 times less than Americans. 100 Mb/s is still very affordable though.
    - lunchables 7y ago
      There is FTTH in more places than you might realize: https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber I live in Nashville and we have FTTH from both AT&T and Google as well as gigabit service from Comcast. I think the problem is the US is really, really big and we widely deployed cable which has been "good enough" (DOCSIS 3.x at 300, 500Mb/s or more) that there historically hasn't been much incentive for people to deploy really expensive fiber networks. But it is certainly improving all the time. I think services like Starlink and fixed 5G are really driving carriers to start deploying more fiber to compete.
aardshark 7y ago
There is also sshuttle, which will forward all TCP traffic on your machine to anywhere you can ssh into and run a python script: https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle It's very easy to use and setup, just do sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 0/0 That's it. All your TCP traffic is now going through your remote server. If you want DNS requests to go through as well, you can add the --dns option.
- bayesianbot 7y ago
  I've been using sshuttle for a while and it works great. But I've always had to exclude (-x) the host address from trying to route through the sshuttle itself and ending up in a loop: sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 -x 12.34.56.789 0.0.0.0/0
Fice 7y ago
> for as little as $5/mo, which includes 1TB/mo of data transfer. There are even much cheaper virtual server offerings, as one probably doesn't need 1 GB of RAM and a dedicated IP for personal VPN or proxy.
ViViDboarder 7y ago
Vultr is a bit cheaper than DO I believe. An ssh proxy is great, but might as well just use OpenVPN if you’re hosting on DO or Vultr since I believe they both have prebuilt images you can deploy with a single click.
- lunchables 7y ago
  I use my VPS for several other things and because it already runs ssh, this was easier for me, so I've never looked into openvpn. I keep telling myself once wireguard is merged into the kernel I will really invest some time into getting up to speed on it.
sandos 7y ago
Google cloud has a free tier giving you a very low spec VM for free. I dont know if it works for a http proxy, but it certainly could work.

squeaky-clean 7y ago

I actually did this for several years, with the added benefit that any number of my (trusted) friends could piggyback on it, given we weren't all using at once. There are dozens of great guides on this, DigitalOcean even hosts some of their own that you can practically copy paste blindly and be done. I'll be honest though, haha, 10% of my VPN usage is legitimate stuff and 90% is just so I can feel safe streaming things illegally that are otherwise hard to purchase. So I switched over to a third party for the simplicity. If I wanted to do more than avoid an email from my ISP I would definitely go back to rolling my own. (I'm also grandfathered into PIA's older cheaper price tier which makes it easier).

throwaway8941 7y ago
>an email from my ISP That's pretty funny. I am from Kazakhstan myself and our largest (pretty much monopolist) internet provider has been encouraging ""piracy"" for as long as I can remember. About 10 years ago a bunch of local media companies (making money from selling badly translated Hollywood movies/video games/etc) lobbied a new law making operating all torrent trackers illegal, and banning access to everything they could find carpet bombing-style. Well, the ban lasted for less than a week, and was lifted after some heavy lobbying by said provider, who was beginning to lose a share of their most valuable customers. Here's another anecdote: in ~2012, when I was getting an FTTH connection, their representative used a popular torrent on my machine to measure the upload/download speeds through the freshly laid cable.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  You're kidding; Kazakhstan has FTTH? I'm in America and still not even close...
  - throwaway8941 7y ago
    Yeah. I pay $10/month for 100 Mb/s with very stable upload and download speeds. You can get 1 Gb/s for $50/mo. I have been serving 10-20 TB each month with no complaints from my provider. But you have to remember that we make something like 5-10 times less than Americans. 100 Mb/s is still very affordable though.
  - lunchables 7y ago
    There is FTTH in more places than you might realize: https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber I live in Nashville and we have FTTH from both AT&T and Google as well as gigabit service from Comcast. I think the problem is the US is really, really big and we widely deployed cable which has been "good enough" (DOCSIS 3.x at 300, 500Mb/s or more) that there historically hasn't been much incentive for people to deploy really expensive fiber networks. But it is certainly improving all the time. I think services like Starlink and fixed 5G are really driving carriers to start deploying more fiber to compete.

aardshark 7y ago

There is also sshuttle, which will forward all TCP traffic on your machine to anywhere you can ssh into and run a python script: https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle It's very easy to use and setup, just do sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 0/0 That's it. All your TCP traffic is now going through your remote server. If you want DNS requests to go through as well, you can add the --dns option.

bayesianbot 7y ago
I've been using sshuttle for a while and it works great. But I've always had to exclude (-x) the host address from trying to route through the sshuttle itself and ending up in a loop: sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 -x 12.34.56.789 0.0.0.0/0

Fice 7y ago

> for as little as $5/mo, which includes 1TB/mo of data transfer. There are even much cheaper virtual server offerings, as one probably doesn't need 1 GB of RAM and a dedicated IP for personal VPN or proxy.

ViViDboarder 7y ago

Vultr is a bit cheaper than DO I believe. An ssh proxy is great, but might as well just use OpenVPN if you’re hosting on DO or Vultr since I believe they both have prebuilt images you can deploy with a single click.

lunchables 7y ago
I use my VPS for several other things and because it already runs ssh, this was easier for me, so I've never looked into openvpn. I keep telling myself once wireguard is merged into the kernel I will really invest some time into getting up to speed on it.

sandos 7y ago

Google cloud has a free tier giving you a very low spec VM for free. I dont know if it works for a http proxy, but it certainly could work.