Building your own Proxy Server

There are sometimes when we don't have access to certain sites especially from Office or school networks. And then we start up searching for proxy sites and anonymous tunnels. These sites potentially create risk of phishing and catching adwares, malwares etc. Also sometimes with content sense firewalls even proxy services are sensed and blocked.

To address this, there is a work around of creating our own proxy service. Proxy is basically used to hide our IP and to surf the web anonymously and safely. It also accelerate responses by caching mechanism. There are two simple ways to create proxy server -

1. If you have a spare computer, you can put it in middle of your network and main node. Install squid (open source web caching/proxy server) on the spare machine with transparent setup. A good article for doing this can be found here
2. If you don't have extra infrastructure to put on, you can still install server on the cloud, you can use Google's App platform to install "mirror".  Mirror is coded in Python and basically is a web caching server. Here is a 5 minute how-to post by @labnol. Using which I have deployed http://anjul-sahu.appspot.com and i-am-free.appspot.com

Try yourself and be safe.