If you’re wanting to scale whois queries you’ll quickly find out that some of the servers hosting these databases impose limits on the amount of times you can query them per day or even per hour.

Countries like Australia & New Zealand impose much heavier limitations on performing queries and using a SOCKS proxy we are able to bypass these limits and continue mining data.

NodeJS installed (we’re using 8.9.3 in this example)

How to perform WHOIS query behind a SOCKS proxy

/usr/bin/whois -> /usr/lib/node_modules/whois/index.js
+ whois@2.5.9
added 8 packages in 1.165s

Step 2: Create “example.js” script with the following content

Using your favourite text editor such as vim, nano or emacs:

var whois = require('whois')
whois.lookup('proxyrack.com', {"proxy": {"ipaddress": "162.210.198.8", "port": 1200, "type": 5}}, function(err, data) {
 console.log(data)
})

‘proxyrack.com’ <— This is the domain you want to lookup

“ipaddress” <— Your proxy IP or hostname

“type” <— 5 for SOCKS5 protocol or 4 for SOCKS4

If your proxy requires authentication you will need to whitelist it with your provider (this can be done in our panel).

How to perform WHOIS queries with SOCKS proxies using NodeJS

What is a proxy server? and does it keep you safe?

At a very basic level, the internet works by a transfer of data. Information is exchanged between senders and receivers. To enable one computer to identify another computer that it needs to exchange information with, each computer has an Internet Protocol or IP address; a series of numbers that is specific to that computer.

A proxy server can also be called an “application-level gateway”, and hides the Internet Protocol address of the computers in its network. In other words, a proxy server acts as a gateway between a local network and the Internet as a whole. On a very basic level, it does this by intercepting connections between sender and receiver. Incoming data enters through one port and is forwarded to the rest of the network via another port allowing computers connecting to the internet via a proxy server to make an indirect connection.

For example, Jill is an employee who works for a company. She would like to access a web page URL using her work network, which is connected to the internet using a proxy server. Jill enters the web page URL that she would like to access. The request is sent from her computer, to the proxy, which then forwards the request onto the requested URL. The requested information is returned to the proxy server, which then forwards it back to Jill on her work computer. In this way Jill is connected to the internet, but indirectly via the proxy server.

So why use an indirect connection via a proxy server?

Most company and school networks have proxy servers, which in most cases monitor use of the internet and block some areas of it. These are content filtering proxy servers that allow the administrator control over what information is sent and received by computers connected to the network. This ensures adherence to an internet acceptable use policy which students and employees will need to abide by in order to access the school or company network. Content filtering proxy servers can be either free or paid for, and contain lists of IP addresses in categories. Whole categories can be banned, such as social networking, gambling, pornography or individual websites can specifically be banned such as Facebook.

There may be an additional layer to a content filtering proxy. When a computer on a network is permitted by the proxy to access a web page URL and the requested information is returned, the content filtering proxy server may also filter the information at this stage. For example, expletives or other unwanted language may be blocked. Image files which contain certain flesh colours may also be blocked, in order to filter out pornographic images.

Proxy servers, conversely, can be used to bypass content filters. Perhaps the most common example is the use of geolocation proxy servers, which are the most common way of bypassing government censorship filters.

A caching proxy server can be used to improve the performance of computers on the network by saving previous requests made by the computer, or other computers on the

network, which reduces the need for the network as a whole to receive information from the internet.

Anonymity on the internet by hiding your IP address.

Whenever you use the internet, your data can be viewed and recorded by many different organisations. Simply visiting a website can cause information to be sent including details about the device used to access the internet and its physical location, and therefore the physical location of the device’s user. Cookies can be transferred that can track the use of the internet, including which websites are visited. Plug in software on your internet browser is notorious for passing on more information about users than is necessary.

There can be many reasons for not wanting information such as this to be provided and so for hiding your IP address. Wanting to be anonymous on the web does not necessarily mean that there is something illegal going on. There can be completely legitimate reasons for wanting to be anonymous.

The way to get around this is to use a proxy server. There many different types to choose from and they all offer different. So what are the options when wishing to browse the internet anonymously?

The most simple way to browse the internet anonymously is by using a web proxy. Web proxy sites are simply sites which are accessed as normal and you can use these sites to enter the URL of the website you want to visit anonymously via the web proxy site. The simplicity and ease of use of these sites comes with a downside; they speeds of accessing the internet through these sites can be very slow. The free sites are usually paid for by advertising services, which can be irritating. To counteract this, some offer a paid service which can increase the speed of browsing via the web proxy and remove adverts.

There are so many web proxy sites on the internet that it can be hard to tell which one to use. Some may be run by criminals who wish to steal the personal details that you enter whilst using the web proxy. Therefore, web proxy sites may not be safe in some scenarios such as online banking or purchasing products online and it is recommended to use a reputable and well known web proxy site. Lists of reputable web proxy sites can be found on the internet. Another option is to use two separate browsers, one which is used via a proxy and one which is not.

These work in a similar way to web proxy sites but they don’t have the web interface. Instead they work by the user manually configuring their browser to connect to the proxy servers URL address. Lists of proxy server addresses can be found on the internet. As with web proxy sites above, sensitive data should not be provided as criminals may be operating the proxy servers hoping to steal sensitive information.

It is relatively straightforward to change a proxy server manually. Once in the options menu of your browser, there will be an option to change LAN settings and enter the IP Address of

the Proxy Server and the Port Number. Some browsers also offer a proxy check tool to ensure that the settings worked.

Virtual Private Networks are not technically proxy servers. A Virtual Private Network is usually software that is downloaded onto the user’s computer and effectively adds the user’s computer onto a private network, without it being physically present in that network. Virtual Private Networks are used in business when employees are working away from the office and wish to log into the office private network

Virtual Private Networks are also good for those wishing to browse the internet anonymously. First the user wanting to stay anonymous connects to the internet via any connection. Next, the user runs downloaded and subscribed to Virtual Private Network software. Connection is made to the Virtual Private Network. Once the connection has been established, the user can access the internet as if physically present on a private network. The user therefore appears to be in the location of the Virtual Private Network.

For users that wish to keep their identity anonymous, Virtual Private Networks are a good choice for those who are happy to pay for products. There are a large range of products available and premium services have dedicated servers for faster speeds.

These methods of hiding your IP address have different levels of anonymity. However, no matter what level of security you require, they all provide peace of mind that your information is secure and you are not being tracked on the internet.

What is a Proxy Server?

When we use our home PC to browse the internet, we can usually access it without any constraints, meaning that we can access Internet via any port:HTTP(80), HTTPS(443),SSH(22) and others.

The downside is that when we browse the Internet site,our IP address is clearly shown it that web server’s logs.Now, although our external IP is usually dynamically assigned from our provider, there are certain information that can be obtained from it, for example, the country of origin.

If we for some reason want to anonymize it, we can use one solution: Squid proxy server. Squid proxy server is a

software that works on all major linux distributions,and is among other uses, used for anonymizing web traffic.It takes user’s request for a web page, and fetches it on behalf of user, like on this picture

So if for example, Squid proxy server is located in the France, and we are located in Brazil, visiting a web site via Squid proxy will show IP address of a Squid proxy, in France.

You will need a virtual private server (VPS) in the cloud,with SSH access to it as a root user. I am using DigitalOcean VPS server with CentOS 6.9 x64 Linux on it.

You can use any SSH client you like, I prefer SSH secure shell,while most people use Putty these days.

Installation of Squid is really simple with yum, and no additional repositories needs to be configured for it.Let’s take a look at the information with 

It will show the version (current version is 3.1.2) and show some information about squid.Installation is done with:

To make sure it is stared at boot time, we should enable it to autostart:

To use Squid server,we need to configure our web browser to explicitly use it. When you configure 

, it is specific to Firefox only, while any of 

, Opera and IE brosers configure system wide settings for a proxy. I will show you how to configure Firefox. You should choose 

and fill the appropriate fields with your server’s IP address, and port 3128.

The proxy server is refusing connections 

error.That is because Squid is refusing all connections by default, otherwise anyone who knows your IP address would be able to connect to it.

We can allow only certain IP addresses to be able to use Squid, but since ADSL IPs are changed usually every day, we need another way. This could be the simple username /password authentication. To do that,we first need to edit the Squid configuration file, /etc/squid/squid.conf, and add these lines at the beginning of the file

 might not be in the same location, you might find it with the following command an update the config file accordingly:

 you may call it whatever you want and place it anywhere( provided 

Now, to populate a file with a username(for example 

We have to restart Squid service so changes in the config files are applied (we can use 

Let’s refresh the page in Firefox, and now instead of an error, we get a prompt asking us to enter using username and password.

Enter the username and password,and you should be able to see the page.

To make sure you are using Squid to surf the net, enter 

Instead of your ADSL IP, your Squid’s server IP will be shown.

Squid HTTP Proxy for CentOS in Under 5 minutes

Sometimes, we need to browse a site with our browser without anybody interfering or watching what we do. For example, we want a visit a site that blocks certain countries based on their IP range. If we set a server that has an IP that is “allowed”, we can use that server to serve as intermediary,so requests seems to come from the server’s IP address and not our(client’s) IP address. So it looks like this;

It would be the same as if we would like to buy an apple from the store(or anything else you can fancy), but we don’t want anybody to know. We could call a boy, whisper him what we want, and he would go to a store and buy an apple with the money we gave him. He would bring an 

 to us, and nobody would know for whom he bought an apple for.

You have probably heard of or used a proxy server like Squid, which accepts client requests for a web page, fetches the web page for user,and then sends the requested page back to the client. It has fancy features such as client authentication, list of banned or allowed IP, even bandwidth throttling.

And then, there is something called SOCKS protocol which actually makes a tunnel via a proxy server,through which our requests are directed. It reaches the proxy server, which gets the web page on client’s behalf,and hands it back to him.It is not limited to HTTP traffic only, like Squid proxy server, but can proxy any TCP traffic. It has older version 4 and new version 5, which support some new capabilities, like client authentication,UDP packages and server-side named resolution. I will show how to set a SOCKS5 connection using a 

You need to have a VPS server available in the cloud,which you can access via SSH (you need an IP and root user’s password).I use VPS provider DigitalOcean, because of it’s simplicity and multiple available Linux distributions, it’s versions, and different 32/64 versions for some of them. For this tutorial, I choose 

 6.9, x64 version, but I have also tested it on Ubuntu 14.05 x64 and it works without any modification. I

In Windows, we can easily set an SSH tunnel by using a well-known SSH client called 

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

You can download it as portable application or install it.Whatever you choose, you should start it,and at the initial screens,as host name enter your server’s IP, here it is 

In the source port, enter any high port (1024 to 65535).We can enter any high port in 

field, I chose 3333 for no particular reason.

 to start the connection, enter the password for user 

The tunnel is now set,and putty should not be closed, only minimized.

Using firefox web browser, we should (depending on a version) choose to modify proxy settings,in my version …

 to use this proxy will also set the proxy for 

 Firefox is different in a sense that configuring it doesn’t change system-wide settings as other browsers do.

If you can, that means that the setup is working. To really see that we are browsing the Net using our server’s IP instead of our computers, let’s visit a page 

ch will show us the IP address from which we are accessing it. It shows:

Create your own SOCKS5 proxies using SSH and Putty

In this video I go over how to create a public and

key pair which is used with our automated VPN server panel.

I will create another video for Windows users.

[KGVID autoplay=false]https://www.proxyrack.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/create_key_pair.mp4[/KGVID]

How to: Create a private and public key pair for ProxyRack VPN panel using OSX

WinGate Proxy Server is a highly skilled Web proxy software for Windows and a communications server that provides secure managed Internet access for your entire network tailored to everything from small networks to large businesses. It is a highly competent HTTP proxy server, a SOCKS server that is designed to provide access control to the Internet through connection, security and computer communications that meet the needs of today’s businesses. Thanks to its support for a host of Internet, the protocols guarantee that WinGate Proxy Server will work with all browsers, instant messaging, SSL, FTP,

audio and video, DirectPlay Internet games and much more. WinGate Proxy Server’s integrated packet inspection firewall ensures that your security is protected at all times by configuring and enforcing customized access control and acceptable usage policies. But if you need more, the program can be expanded with modules to analyze incoming data for malware or filter inappropriate content into web traffic. The WinGate Proxy server logging and auditing capabilities combined with a real-time activity viewer allow you to always monitor exactly how your Internet connection is used and integrated Web and DNS caching means that the program Could improve network performance, too. In addition to a full range of features, the WinGate Proxy Server licensing options give you the flexibility to tailor your needs to your budget, whether you need to run a business, a small business or a home network.

In this article, we are going to setup WinGate Proxy Server on Windows 10. So, the first thing that we need is a Windows 10 VM with basic system resources and networking setup including its FQDN and IP address settings.

Login to your Windows 10 server using RDP with the Administrator

or domain user with Admin rights to download the latest package of WinGate Proxy server from this

. Click to save the .exe package to your desired location on your server, once you prompted.

Installing WinGate Proxy Server on Windows 10

After downloading the latest package of WinGate Proxy Server, double-click its ‘.exe’ package to start installation setup wizard of WinGate proxy server. After that, you will be greeted by its welcome page to getting started with the installation on your Windows 10 server. Click on the “Next” button to continue.

After starting the installation, you will have to pass through a number of steps to complete the installation wizard.

Read and Accept the license agreement before the installation and use of WinGate by choosing the right option as shown.

After accepting the license agreement, click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

Choose the location on your system, where you like to place the WinGate installation setup. Make sure that the location have at least 95MB of free space available there. The default location is

, click to ‘change’ button if you want to choose some other directory or move the Next step.

In this section, you will be asked to choose the program features, that you wish to install on your system. Let’s choose all features and move to the Next step.

Provide your Administrative User Name and Email ID along with the Senders address for the administrative alerts.

Next, review the configuration changes, before proceeding installation. You can click on ‘BACK’ if you like to make any changes or click on the ‘Next’ button to proceed with the installation.

Once you click on the ‘Next’ button, your installation process will start processing files and other selecting configurations. After finishing the installation process of WinGate, click on the ‘Finish’ to exit the installer.

Next, you will be asked to reboot your system to complete the installation. So, it’s recommended that you must reboot your system after installation, let’s click on the ‘Yes’ to go for system reboot and wait till it back.

Once your system is back after reboot, type ‘Wingate’ in the search bar to see WinGate Applications launcher like WinGate Engine Monitor as shown below.

You will also find the WinGate Engine running icon under the notifications area. Let’s right-click on the icon and click to open the WinGate Management.

The WinGate Management Console is the newly designed user interface to replace the GateKeeper role in previous versions of WinGate. Unlike its predecessor, it will display only the components and modules that have been saved and loaded by the WinGate engine, so that the content and composition of what is in the WinGate management console can vary considerably.

When combined with the new authorization system, it allows administrators to lock access and control of each module so that the WinGate Management console will only display the user who logs on to WinGate. This allows you to use the WinGate management console as a user authorization tool that users can use to identify themselves to WinGate if necessary.

Click the ‘localhost’ box to start WinGate Management using the ‘localhost’ connection profile. This will start the synchronization to load the modules, but right after that, you will be prompted for its License activation first, proceed as shown below.

After you click on ‘OK’ key, you will be directed towards the license activation key. Here you will have two options whether to activate by sending the Online request or you can also have the option to choose the Offline method. But, we will go for the recommended

Move to the next option to enter the license information, select the first option if you have already purchased the license or go for the second option to activate your free fully featured 30 days license limited to few features or select the third option to activate the free license and click on ‘Next’ to continue.

Next, your system will an online request to activate the free license for your system, after verifying your request, your free license will be activated as shown below.

Once you have clicked on the ‘Finish’ button, you will be asked to restart your WinGate Proxy server by selecting ‘Yes’ as we have updated the license activation key.

In this section, we need to provide user database provider that will be used for users authentication and for users and groups management required for WinGate functions.

Click on ‘Next’ button, and you will have to choose a User Database provider from the multiple available options, whether you can use ‘Active Directory Connector’, ‘Windows Users and Groups Connector’ or ‘WinGate User Database Engine’. As we are using the trial license, so we will go for the third option.

Next, click on the ‘Finish’ button and login to WinGate using the Administrator credentials as shown in the image below.

After you finish with user database setup, WinGate will get restarted and you will be able to login on to the Management console of WinGate using the Administrator credentials as shown below.

That’s it, WinGate has been installed and now after successful login the WinGate Management, you will be directed towards its welcome page, where you can configure your Network Adopter settings, install or configure services or setup your web access policies.

Now you can start using WinGate Proxy server by selecting the role from the left navigation bar. Just point to the desired role and configure it as per your requirements. For example, if you want to restrict web access for your users, then you can do so by selecting the option to ‘Add Rule’ or ‘Edit Rule’ under the ‘Web Access Control’ bar as shown in the image below.

In order to get more help and instruction to use WinGate Proxy Server, do not forget to view latest videos and its help topics available on its Welcome page. While there is extensive instruction are given on the right of its management console to configure your proxy roles.

In this article, you have learned about the installation and configuration of WinGate Proxy Server on Windows 10. WinGate has a lot of features and its befits to be used at any level. It is quite suitable for firms irrespective of whether there is small scale or large scale or home network. WinGate Proxy Server has various key functions and one of its significant functionalities is that it gives a managed and secured Internet access to the entire network with the help of the multiple and single related internet connections with flexibility and advanced access control policies for your network. You can even customize your own dashboards and monitor the flow of your network.

How to setup a proxy server with WinGate on Windows 10

This article is about working through a chain of proxy servers and to setup SRelay(Srelay – the SOCKS proxy and Relay). Using proxy chains, you can make the connection to a remote host that will be performed sequentially from one proxy server to another. This can be useful when a remote host is only accessible through multiple proxies or when you want to ensure a high level of anonymity. Whenever we send a packet to a target, that packet contains our IP address in the IP header. When we establish a TCP connection, the target system will log our IP address as it logs all connections. So, if we ignore any security alarms or alerts, our IP address will be get logged by the target hosts which increase the possibility of detection. To be on safe side of detection, we can use any intermediary machine whose IP address will be left on the target system using proxies. For this purpose, we can string multiple proxies in a chain using SSH, Srelay or proxychains, it makes much harder to detect our original IP address and to make it very unpredictable that if any traffic is attributed to our IP address.

To setup, a chain of Socks5 proxies, make sure that its it involves multiple proxies and if anyone proxy is not functioning, the entire chain will not work. If the connection is broken at one proxy, the entire connection to the remote host is lost and the total lag will be the sum of all lags at all proxy servers in the chain.

How to chain socks5 proxies using ProxyChains

ProxyChains is used to redirect connections through proxy servers by forcing any TCP connection made by any given TCP client to follow through a single proxy or a chain of proxy. It supports SOCKS4, SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT proxy servers with basic and socks authentications. It can be best used when the only way to get “outside” from your LAN is through the proxy server or when you are behind the restrictive firewall which filters outgoing connections to some ports.

The ProxyChains package is available in the default repository of Ubuntu 16 and we can be installed by issuing below command in your command line terminal.

After installing the proxychains package, you will find its configuration file in ‘/etc/’ directory. Let’s open it using your command line text editor to view or change the default configurations.

Here is the default configuration file of ProxyChain, let’s say if you are using SOCKS proxy with port 1280, you can replace 9150 with 1280. Just replace the default proxy settings at the end of that file with your desired settings. Follow the Proxy List format as shown in the image to chain your Socks5 or other Socks servers in correct order.

You can use the following three type of proxy chains:

In Dynamic chains, each connection will be done via chained proxies all proxies chained in the order as they appear on the list at least one proxy must be online to play in the chain (dead proxies are skipped) otherwise, EINTR is returned to the app.

In a strict chain, each connection will be done via chained proxies where all proxies chained in the order as they appear in the list, while all proxies must be online to play in chain otherwise EINTR is returned to the app.

Each connection will be done via random proxy from the list. This option is good to test your IDS.

You can then use proxy chains using below command.

This will run the ‘telnet’ command through your defined chained proxies specified in ‘proxychains.conf’ file to the target host.

Similarly you can use below command to update your system by using your defined chain proxies.

Your system will be updated not using your LAN internet but using your configured chain proxy servers.

Srelay is Socks proxy server ad relay, a middleman handling the connection with the server for clients. Its an Open Source and free to use the proxy server which includes socks version 5 and version 4 support as well. The srelay socks version 5 can be used to connect/bind operation for TCP relaying and connection control with tcp_wrappers(libwrap). The srelay only supports ‘No Authentication’ and ‘Username/Password Authentication’ using the server host’s

It is some time required to use socks authentication to connect to next-hop socks server while working as the intermediate of socks servers chain. In this case, you can specify the username and password for the next-hop socks by using

Socks Relay can be downloaded by following this

. You can simply copy the source link address and then download on your server using

$ wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/socks-relay/socks-relay/srelay-0.4.8/srelay-0.4.8b5.tar.gz

Once the package is downloaded, then extract the archived package using the below command.

Then change your directory to the extracted srelay folder, compile it and then installing using ‘make’ command.

After compilation runs the ‘make’ command and then copy ‘srelay’ script to the following binary folder using ‘cp’ command.

Following are the main option to configure your srelay proxy

– disable-thread disable pthread feature.

– with – libwrap = PATH | yes | no with tcp_wrapper access control.

Do not incorporate access control by TcpWrappers

Srelay configuration samples are under the scripts / directory. Let’s use below command to copy its startup script to ‘/etc/init.d’ directory.

$ sudo cp scripts/rc.srelay /etc/init.d/srelay

Now start its service by going through the

After starting srelay service, make sure that its started successfully without any error. You can check by its port and process if its running or not use below commands.

How to configure Srelay as Relaying SOCKS

Now you can configure Srelay to use just as a SOCKS server or to configure it as a relaying socks proxy by opening its configuration file using your command line editor.

# dest     dest-port    next-hop    next-port
Network_A      any         socks_A     1080
Network_B      any         socks_B     1080
Network_C      any         socks_C     1080

Here in this configuration file, Network_A, Network_B, and Network C may be actual network addresses and socks_A, socks_B and socks_C are the host addresses with their ports that may be different in the configuration file. If you like to control that kind of destination, you have to set FQDN. In many cases, an FQDN might be useless, so, you can do something using wildcards as destinations as well just like shown below.

Example
  # dest      dest-port   next-hop  next-port
  0.0.0.0      any          xxx.xx.xx.xx    1080
  *               any          xxx.xx.xx    1080

This shown that every IPv4, FQDN destination should go through the next Hop SOCKS of xxx.xx.xx.xx port 1080. After making your saved changes, start srelay service using below command

$ srelay -c srelay-0.4.8b5/srelay.conf -r -s

You can find out more about the available options with

srelay 0.4.8b5 2010/12/20 (Tomo.M)
usage: srelay [options]
options:
        -c file config file
        -i i/f  listen interface IP[:PORT]
        -J i/f  outbound interface name
        -m num  max child/thread
        -o min  idle timeout minutes
        -p file pid file
        -a np   auth methods n: no, p:pass
        -u file srelay password file
        -f      run into foreground
        -r      resolve client name in log
        -s      force logging to syslog
        -t      disable threading
        -b      avoid BIND port restriction
        -g      use the same interface for outbound as inbound
        -I      inetd mode
        -v      show version and exit
        -h      show this help and exit

In this article we discussed proxy chaining, then installed and configured it, using ProxyChains and SRelay on Ubuntu 16.04. Proxy Chaining is awesome, that allows you to chain multiple proxies to connect to each other and then wrap your program of choice and connect to the Internet. This protects you and masks your IP with many layers which apparently much difficult for anyone who tries to reach back to your host. There are many other proxy chaining packages available for the cross platforms, like Tor,

, ProxyHam etc. Any of these tools can be used to achieve the purpose but Srelay is a simple but effective method to stay anonymous over the internet. As by using the normal browser and add-ons you won’t get much security as you get in chaining process. You might also consider the internet speed while using such intermediate servers but if its already cached, then the response time will be remarkable for your requested websites as those are loaded from cache database. That’s it for today’s topic, feel free to get back to us in case of any further assistance or suggestions.

How to chain socks5 proxies and setup using Srelay on Ubuntu 16

Dante is a free SOCKS server and a flexible product developed by Inferno Nettverk A/S that can be used to provide convenient and secure network connectivity. Its combination of a SOCKS server and a SOCKS client, implementing RFC 1928 and other related standards. The Dante is an Open Source SOCKS server that can be used together with many popular network applications which already have SOCKS support built in to them, such as most web-browsers, Bloomberg terminals, instant messaging programs, and many others. Dante is used by Fortune 100 companies and large international organizations, both as a standard forward proxy server and as a reverse proxy server. There are several commercial modules are available for the Dante server that can be used to enhance its functionality. Your data will be routed through the Danted proxy server that generates an arbitrary IP address before it reach your destination. The socks proxy server is a generic proxy and supports nearly every application which requires the application to run socksified. The socks server listens by default on port ‘1080’ and the applications that want to use the socks server have to be sockified. The socks client wraps the original request into a socks request which means that all traffic will be redirected to the socks server at port 1080.

The Dante SOCKS server have a lot of benefits, including security and TCP/IP termination that is there will be no direct contact between hosts inside and outside of the customer network. It helps in resource control including bandwidth, sessions and logging about host information and data transferred. Let’s see how can install and use the SOCKS5 proxy server using Dante on Ubuntu 16.04 Operating System.

In this tutorial we will be using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as it’s one of the major

distributions, which will make sure you get the most out of your resources on your VPS to have a smooth proxy with small budget VPS services.

First of all connect to your Ubuntu 16.04 server using root user credentials and make sure you have your apt packages are updated and fully patched. You can update your Ubuntu server using below command.

key to continue your system updates and upgrade process by hitting ‘Enter’ key. Once your system is back with latest updates and upgrades, move to the next section to start installing Dante Socks5 proxy server on Ubuntu.

Check out our full range of Datacenter Proxies

Installing Dante Proxy Server on Ubuntu 16.04

The default Ubuntu repositories have an outdated Dante-server package that is the version 1.1.19 which also has some bugs, like the authentication feature does not work properly in this version of Dante server.

So, if you don’t need authentication then you can install it using the below ‘apt’ command in your command line terminal.

Once the installation is complete, you can restart its services and then check its status to find if the services are up or not by issuing below commands as shown.

To check the version of the installed danted server, use below command.

Installing Dante from source on Ubuntu 16.04

The best way to install Dante is to use its source package for the latest available version which is currently version 1.4.2 . You can download the latest version from this

. Copy the source link and download the Dante package using below

# wget http://www.inet.no/dante/files/dante-1.4.2.tar.gz

Once the package has been downloaded, then extract it within the current directory using below command.

Change directory to the extracted folder to compile and install the package.

utilities installed on your system prior to compile and installation of Dante package. You can use below command to install.

Now let’s run the below command to compile the source with required prefix as shown.

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --disable-client --without-libwrap --without-bsdauth --without-gssapi --without-krb5 --without-upnp --without-pam

At the end of the compilation process, you will get its configuration status as shown below.

 Configure status:

Client:            Disabled, using --disable-client
Server:            Enabled
Preloading:        Enabled
Libwrap:           Disabled, using --without-libwrap
BSD Auth:          Disabled, using --without-bsdauth
PAM:               Disabled, using --without-pam
GSSAPI:            Not found/disabled
KRB5:              Not found/disabled
SASL:              Not found/disabled
UPNP:              Not found/disabled
Compatability:     issetugid setproctitle strlcpy strvis

                     Modules:

redirect:          Not found
bandwidth:         Not found
ldap:              Not found

After that run the following ‘make’ command to install the compiled packages.

You can check the installed version of Dante using below command.

# /usr/sbin/sockd -v
Dante v1.4.2.  Copyright (c) 1997 - 2014 Inferno Nettverk A/S, Norway

Now we are going to create the configuration file for the dante-server’s start/stop script. To do so create a new file in ‘/etc/init.d/’ directory and place the following contents in it using your command line editor.

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          sockd
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start the dante SOCKS server.
# Description:       SOCKS (v4 and v5) proxy server daemon (sockd).
#                    This server allows clients to connect to it and
#                    request proxying of TCP or UDP network traffic
#                    with extensive configuration possibilities.
### END INIT INFO
#
# dante SOCKS server init.d file. Based on /etc/init.d/skeleton:
# Version:  @(#)skeleton  1.8  03-Mar-1998  miquels@cistron.nl 
# Via: https://gitorious.org/dante/pkg-debian

PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
NAME=sockd
DAEMON=/usr/sbin/$NAME
DAEMON_ARGS="-D"
PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
SCRIPTNAME=/etc/init.d/$NAME
DESC="Dante SOCKS daemon"
CONFFILE=/etc/$NAME.conf

# Exit if the package is not installed
[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0

# Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
. /lib/init/vars.sh

# Define LSB log_* functions.
# Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
# and status_of_proc is working.
. /lib/lsb/init-functions

set -e

# This function makes sure that the Dante server can write to the pid-file.
touch_pidfile ()
{
  if [ -r $CONFFILE ]; then
    uid="`sed -n -e 's/[[:space:]]//g' -e 's/#.*//' -e '/^user\.privileged/{s/[^:]*://p;q;}' $CONFFILE`"
    if [ -n "$uid" ]; then
      touch $PIDFILE
      chown $uid $PIDFILE
    fi
  fi
}

case "$1" in
  start)
    if ! egrep -cve '^ *(#|$)' \
        -e '^(logoutput|user\.((not)?privileged|libwrap)):' \
        $CONFFILE > /dev/null
    then
        echo "Not starting $DESC: not configured."
        exit 0
    fi
    echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
    touch_pidfile
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
        || return 1
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
        $DAEMON_ARGS \
        || return 2
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
    RETVAL="$?"
    [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
    [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  reload|force-reload)
    #
    #   If the daemon can reload its config files on the fly
    #   for example by sending it SIGHUP, do it here.
    #
    #   Make this a do-nothing entry, if the daemon responds to changes in its config file
    #   directly anyway.
    #
     echo "Reloading $DESC configuration files."
     start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile \
        $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- -D
  ;;
  restart)
    #
    #   If the "reload" option is implemented, move the "force-reload"
    #   option to the "reload" entry above. If not, "force-reload" is
    #   just the same as "restart".
    #
    echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON
    sleep 1
    touch_pidfile
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \
      --exec $DAEMON -- -D
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  status)
    status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
    ;;
  *)
    N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
    # echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
    echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|status|force-reload}" >&2
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

and give it execution permissions and update thh startup script using below commands.

First we start the global server settings before going to configure the advance settings of access rules. There are two types of rules that have to be defined in its configuration file.

rules are mainly designed to specify which client is granted access to which socks server. In the socks rule section the actual application request is evaluated. By adding port numbers or rages access to the specific hosts or networks can be limited.

Let’s create the sockd configuration by placing the following parameters into the

logoutput: /var/log/socks.log

internal: ens160 port = 1080
external: ens160

method: username
user.privileged: root
user.notprivileged: nobody

client pass {
        from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0
        log: error connect disconnect
}


client block {
        from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0
        log: connect error
}

pass {
        from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0
        log: error connect disconnect
}

block {
        from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0
        log: connect error
}

Save and close the configuration file, then move to the next step to start its services.