Setting up a proxy at work to use when CAPPED

[antowan]

Hi there

If you get capped on your ADSL account all is not lost. If you have permanent internet at work and a friendly and helpful system / network administrator you may well be able to setup your own proxy at work or at any locally accessible site (physical presence) willing to provide the bandwidth to you. You can even use a friend also connected via ADSL's remaining bandwidth (of he agrees) to get International connectivity restored when you are capped.

This is done via a proxy. The only requirement is that the proxy provider must be in South Africa because when you are capped international access goes down to virtually zero!

Visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/ijbswa/ and download the dstribution of Privoxy (for this example) which is a free proxy server for nearly every operating system you can think of.

Setup the proxy server on the machine with international bandwidth (preferably one with a fixed IP) and change its confic file to listen to the IP of the host machine and not the local net.

Now change your browser settings on your capped machine at home to use the proxy at the address of the proxy host machine.

And as they say, Bob's your uncle!

Make sure you get permission for this because this is the stuff people get fired for if they do not have the propper permissions!

Oh, and remember to tell your browser not to use the proxy for South African sites. Usually a simple .co.za .co.org exclusion will work...

Cheers
Antowan

He who does not understand the value of war at the right time, cannot comprehend the value of life at any time - Anonymous

 

[DFantom]

Telkom is in the process of stopping this from happening

 

[podo]

DFantom,

They can't really stop it from happening []

Firewalling off certain proxy ports won't really do anything, since people can just select different ports, and they can't conceivably firewall off every port in existence.

People could also connect to their proxies over some kind of home-made VPN solution (like the PPP-over-TCP-over-SSH connection you can establish between two FreeBSD machines)

All they could do is implement the 10GB local cap that has been floating around as a rumour for the past few months.

As to you speaking so authoritatively about them being in the process to stop this from happening, am I to assume that you are the Telkom spy in our midst about which so many of the newbies are speculating and in fear of?

If so, prepare to be destroyed [}]

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

 

[antowan]

lol

I also doubt that Telkom would do this. The ability to connect to a remote PC might well be the main reason many people get ADSL in South Africa. Telkom would be cutting off their nose to spite their face if they block this. Why? Because they cannot make money from it? Why don't they offer the service themselves then?

Regards
Antowan

He who does not understand the value of war at the right time, cannot comprehend the value of life at any time - Anonymous

 

[mbs]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I also doubt that Telkom would do this.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
They can't - besides the 'technical complexities' (to them) which would merely expose their incompetence further, there are legal issues around the prevention of site access for reasons that are not regulatory in nature or with obvious anti-criminal intent, as far as I'm aware. To do this for purely commercial reasons would be further grounds for hauling them before ICASA...

 

[me]

Thanks for the tip! It was very applicable to my situation... it was a kind of 'doh!' moment when I read the post, because I've been thinking about ways round the cap since I got ADSL last month.

I found an excellent shareware proxy server for Windows that includes port tunneling capabilities as well (very useful for getting non-HTTP stuff to work through your proxy).

See http://www.grok.co.uk

Also useful is a VNC app, like UltraVNC: http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/

That lets you remotley administrate your proxy server.