Friday, April 5, 2019

Web Proxy Server Using Proxy Workbench and ProxySwitcher

My family and I recently visited Hong Kong Disneyland to celebrate my daughter's seventh birthday. We stayed in Explorer Lodge Hotel and were greeted by Disney characters like Goofy, Minnie and Mickey Mouse. We absolutely had a great time and will surely be back again.


We spent the next few days in Tsim Sha Tsui, which is a shopping district in Kowloon Island. Our hotel was just near Victoria Harbour so we went there to get a glimpse of the lights and sound show.


We also went up to Victoria Peak in Hong Kong Island via a vintage tram. It was windy and raining at the Sky Terrace so we just stayed indoors shopping for souvenirs.



Proxy servers can be appliances, or they can be software that is installed on a server operating system. These servers act like a proxy firewall in that they create the web connection between systems on their behalf, but they can typically allow and disallow traffic on a more granular basis.

Proxy servers can provide an additional beneficial function called web caching. When a proxy server is configured to provide web caching, it saves a copy of all web pages that have been delivered to internal computers in a web cache. If any user requests the same page later, the proxy server has a local copy and need not spend the time and effort to retrieve it from the Internet. This greatly improves web performance for frequently requested pages.


You can install a local proxy server in order to monitor and apply IT policy on web traffic (HTTP/HTTPS). I tried to install Proxy Workbench (PWB) in Windows 7 VM and followed the installation wizard.


PWB will pop-up a warning saying it has several common ports configured automatically. Just click OK.


Click 8080 HTTP Proxy - Web and you'll see HTTP is already ticked (assigned). To verify the port, click Configure HTTP for port 8080



To test PWB, open Internet Explorer (my Windows 10 machine) > Tools > Internet options.


Under Connections tab > click LAN settings.


Tick Use a proxy server for your LAN > type the Address of the Proxy Server > type Port 8080 for HTTP > click OK > then OK again.


You can monitor the HTTP traffic in PWB.


You can view the details of the HTTP traffic by clicking a specific TCP transaction



You can also use an online proxy server on the Internet. I've installed ProxySwitcher and followed the installation wizard.
 

Once installation is finished, click Start 15 Day Trial.


A Welcome pop-up will appear ,just click Next.



Click Find New Servers, Rescan Servers, Recheck Dead > click Finish.


ProxySwitcher will automatically list and download the online proxy servers from around the world.


To use one of the proxy servers, go to Basic Anonymity and double click (or click the Switch to Selected Proxy Server icon above) a specific proxy server (Ukraine in this case). The switch icon will show as connected or turn into green.


You can verify the current proxy server IP address on your machine using an online tool such as whatsmyip.org. My web browser displayed the Ukraine public IP address (195.162.81.91 in this case).
 

You can try using another proxy server by doing a double click (Russia in this case).


Verify again the new proxy server IP address being on the machine.


1 comment:

  1. I was trying proxy workbench but I was not able to connect to internet. don't know what's going wrong seems everything fine.

    ReplyDelete