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Everyone at least once thought about of anonymity on the Internet. In this article I will tell you about one of the easiest ways to set up your own proxy server, which securely hides your IP address and encrypts your internet traffic.

I do not claim to originality, but surely there are people to whom this information is helpful.

To hide the IP address, encrypt and compress the Internet traffic, we set up the SSH-tunnel with the plink tool. Download this tool from the official website

Important – you must have hosting with SSH shell access. This may be a shared hosting, VPS / VDS or dedicated server. If you have your own website, then ask your technical support username, password and address of the SSH server.

Configure the plink

Create a file plink.bat (using Notepad or other text editor) and add the lines:

plink -ssh address_of_your_SSH_server -C -N -l your_username -pw your_password -D 127.0.0.1:8081
pause

(replace “your_username”, “your_password” and ” address_of_your_SSH_server” to the real value of your user, password and address of the SSH server).

Save the file plink.bat in the same folder with the plink.exe and run it (double click). If done correctly, you will get a black screen with the similar text:

Press key “y” and Enter.

Congratulations, SSH tunnel is created. This window should not be closed, otherwise the server connection is closed.

If you entered an incorrect username or password, you will see the similar error:

How to configure Internet Explorer to use a proxy server

Tools – > Internet Options – > Connections – > LAN settings. Set «User a proxy server for your LAN» and press «Advanced», set «Socks» 127.0.0.1, port 8081.

Check

To check, open the site 2ip.ru. If done correctly, you will see the address of your SSH server instead of your real IP address.

Your IP address is hidden, Internet traffic is encrypted and compressed.

Other programs

You can use the program FreeCap or similar tools to configure the proxy in other programs. I will not describe in detail the setup of this program, just say that you have to set the address 127.0.0.1 and port 8081

I have no website (hosting)

Theoretically, you can use free hosting with SSH shell access, but I do not know the quality free web hosting.

Windows only

This method has been tested on Windows XP and Windows Vista. On Windows 7 it should work, but I can’t check.
On *nix OS you can use ssh instead of plink.

Server Configuration (optional)

If you have a VPS/VDS or dedicated server, I recommend you to create a special user without rights for the SSH tunnel.

Secure password (optional)

If you want type your password manually every time you run SSH tunnel, then remove from the startup code “-pw your_password”

plink -ssh address_of_your_SSH_server -C -N -l your_username -D 127.0.0.1:8081

RTFM

Official documentation

Absolute anonymity does not exist.

This method does not give you absolute anonymity. Don’t do stupid things.