Amahi Forums

I followed a combination of these two instructions to try to set up my HDA to act as a proxy server so I can use public wifi without worrying too much.
http://lifehacker.com/5763170/how-to-se ... nd-privoxy
https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Privoxy

The VPN already works beautifully. I regularly access the files on my HDA from outside.

As far as I could tell, I got privoxy installed on the server, and changed the config file to my address.

I'm not really sure if I turned it on correctly since the terminal didn't give me any kind of response after the command.

Chrome says it can't find the proxy server, so there's that.

Is there an additional step that's not mentioned in these instructions? Like do I have to go into the router and forward port 8118 or something?

As you may have noticed, this was documented for Fedora. Might have been 12 or 14, not sure. The same set up on Ubuntu may be different.

Since this was a user contribution, not sure if any steps were left out. It's a trial and error along with some research on your part that it will most likely require to work correctly. Also keep in mind that Chrome might not be the best browser to test with. Recommend you try IE or Firefox as well. Often times these things are browser sensitive.

If you by chance sort it out and there are steps missing or incorrect, please feel free to update the wiki guidance. It will benefit others and we would greatly appreciate it

I don't get why this hasn't already been done.

Isn't using the HDA as a proxy server a really obvious and valuable function?

I don't know much about servers, which is why I'm using Amahi, but it seems like it shouldn't be particularly hard for a server guru to set it up to automatically pass messages back and forth.

Like...does nobody else who goes to the trouble of maintaining a home server want to use it to browse safely while out and about? Is that just my thing? Does everyone else do it differently? I've seen products that make it easy; you just plug in a pair of USB sticks. There are programs that make it easy to use a regular computer as a proxy server. Why is it not easy on something that is already a server?

In my past experience, this is not something many home users work with. We do have a feature request to add something similar to Amahi 7, but not sure where it stands in the priority list.

I think most users are interested in media and file server features. That seems to be the trend we have seen over the years. Not as much interest in the proxy server implementation on the server side.

Just my opinion, but I use antivirus and malware tools on my client. No need for a proxy server. I have not had an issue yet in over 10 years.

Just my opinion, but I use antivirus and malware tools on my client. No need for a proxy server. I have not had an issue yet in over 10 years.

I just want to clarify that I don't want to use privoxy for ad filtering. I'm not going to use it to browse from my HDA while I'm at home.

I want to VPN back to my HDA while I'm out somewhere on sketchy public wifi and have privoxy make all of my browsing happen from home. That way everything happening on the public wifi is encrypted.

Check out IPsec VPN. The wiki guidance sounds like what you want to achieve.

https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/IPSec_VPN

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I assume you mean this part:

Also google-ing "what is my ip" will report back that you are still on the local network.

It turns out that the Amahi VPN is set to use a split VPN tunnel by default. If you want to use blocked services while behind somebody's internet filters, you can use these steps to encrypt your traffic and use blocked services like twitter and facebook.

The wiki is incredibly vague, but if you think it's relevant than I'll interpret it in the context of this thread.

Is this saying that when I install the IPsec VPN app on Amahi, and a compatible client on my mobile device (phone, laptop, etc), the requests sent to my network will use the VPN but requests to the internet will go straight out of whatever random network I happen to be on. Then, if I reconfigure Amahi to not split VPN traffic, ALL requests (including internet browsing) will be sent through the VPN so my web traffic will appear to come and go from my home HDA?

I'm currently using OpenVPN and HDAconnect to VPN into my HDA while out in the world. If Amahi's default is to split VPN traffic, can I just use this part...

Below are the steps to direct all traffic through the VPN. Please note: this will divert all of your traffic through your hda, but you will not be able to access some of your network resources.

...to change my HDA's default and get it to work as a proxy using the VPN server/client that's already working?