My Universty is super-paranoid and they block all instent messanging clients and all smtp servers, bittorrent, etc. I have a linux server on a high speed offsite location and I'd I'm thinking I might somehow be able to use that as a proxy to connect to these banned services. I've never set up a proxy server and I'm looking for advice and weather you think that stratagy will work and also which proxy serverto use and what configuration options I need to pay attention to. I'm using a windows desktop so it'll need to be easily configured with that. I'm not terribly concerned about a secure connection since I won't be transfering important data and I don't think the school will go to great length analizing the traffic coming from my port. But I obviously don't want anyone else to be able to hijack my proxy server. Does anyone know of a good guide I can read that will bring me through the process of setting it up step by step?

You could try an install of IP Cop with SquidGuard. I have never used the SquidGuard, but have used IP Cop for about a year now. The distro also supports VPN'ing and a bunch of other things.

http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/proxy.html

http://www.ipcop.org/

Hope this helps. Dont know if it would be useful to your cause or not.

If your university is so paranoid, are you sure they don't block off-site proxy traffic as well? I work for a University and you'd be surprised how much data analysis they do perform. I certainly don't let any of my IM traffic go out unencrypted.

I ssh tunnel traffic out to a Socks 5 (dante) proxy. I'm going to be adding squid soon to get my web browsing as well.

I also found this add-on called url filter.

http://www.urlfilter.net/download.html

~Ryan

When oh when are people going to realise that a) security measures are in place for a reason: ask your network admin for the reasons and b) LQ does not condone nor help with people illegally trying to circumvent other people's security policies: if you get caught you'll be in trouble, don't bring us into it.

i have reported this thread for closure.

Closed for the reasons stated above.