Tag Archives: proxy

proxychains: Sorry to be of so little help

I’m into the P section to where proxy tools take over, and unfortunately into another fuzzy area.

I’ve never knowingly used a proxy utility, unless it was part of an office network and I just didn’t know about it.

So again, I’m trying to speak in vague terms because I have so little experience with them.

From what I gather about proxychains though, it looks fairly simple to set up. The howto page doesn’t say much, but the configuration file is well documented and I have a feeling even I could tackle it.

kmandla@lv-r1fz6: ~$ proxychains --help
ProxyChains-3.1 (http://proxychains.sf.net)
/usr/bin/proxychains: line 9: exec: --: invalid option
exec: usage: exec [-cl] [-a name] [command [arguments ...]] [redirection ...]

kmandla@lv-r1fz6: ~$

But beyond that I don’t have any advice. I can’t be sure this is any better than other proxy utilities either, and I don’t dare offer an uneducated opinion on something so important.

Sorry to be of so little help. 😦

privoxy: I feel obligated to mention it

privoxy is something I’m going to mention out of the same sense of obligation that led me to include things like the console version of inkscape, lilypond, and stuff like that.

What I know of privoxy is minimal. I understand that it can function as an ad blocker, but that seems like overkill to me. And while that’s not technically a console responsibility … well, I guess I can include it. 😐

Setup does not look intimidating; if I understand correctly, once the daemon is running, settings can be adjusted through a browser pointed at the privoxy tool page. Which is clever, in a way.

All the same, it’s a bit more work than I need, for something that can get done with a browser plugin. My needs are simple.

On the other hand, if you’re not using a browser with nifty gadgets like that, and editing /etc/hosts is not to your liking, perhaps the privoxy route might be an option.

privoxy does a lot more than just ad blocking, and I’m doing it a disservice by not mentioning them here. I was told a long time ago that privoxy is used alongside tor, but I don’t see it listed in the dependencies in Arch, so perhaps they are not interrelated.

As you can tell, my experience with privoxy (like so many programs I’ve listed here) is next-to-none, so if you have advice, please feel free to correct me.