How do I setup a proxy system wide?

dragos240 · 08-16-2011, 10:54 AM

I know how to setup proxies inside a program, but is there a good way to setup a system wide proxy? I have a proxy running on my other computer. The reason I want to do this is because my network is setup like this:

Internet -> Router -> Netbook -> My Desktop

I have my netbook forwarding requests to my desktop. I can browse the web and do anything. But I can't access other computers on my network. On my netbook, it takes wlan0 and forwards it to eth0, eth0 uses 192.168.0.0/24, the network that comes from my router is 192.168.1.0/24.

So I can access other systems in my network on my netbook, but not the desktop. I run a squid server on the netbook, and when my desktop connects to that, it runs just as fast really and I'm able to access the network. The problem is I can only use this with firefox, and not every program. They will just try to use the network I set up, not the proxy server. Can I set up my desktop to use squid's proxy system wide? Or will I need a SOCKS proxy? If I do need a SOCKS proxy, can someone point me towards a good tutorial? A system wide proxy seems to be the solution here until I get another wireless card. Or maybe there's a way to use iptables to forward connections from 192.168.1.0/24?

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,
Dragos240

TimothyEBaldwin · 08-16-2011, 12:38 PM

You need neither a proxy or iptables to solve your problem, though if you have iptables configured to block stuff you may need to change it.

Enable IP forwarding on your netbook, so it becomes a router and add a route table entry on your router appliance so that it forwards traffic for your desktop to your netbook.

dragos240 · 08-16-2011, 01:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TimothyEBaldwin

You need neither a proxy or iptables to solve your problem, though if you have iptables configured to block stuff you may need to change it.

Enable IP forwarding on your netbook, so it becomes a router and add a route table entry on your router appliance so that it forwards traffic for your desktop to your netbook.

This is what I run so that it forwards the connections from my netbook to my desktop:

Code:

/etc/rc.d/networkmanager stop
/etc/rc.d/gpm start
/etc/rc.d/iptables start
/etc/rc.d/dnsmasq start
iptables -A FORWARD -o wlan0 -i eth0 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE
/etc/rc.d/iptables save
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.0.0.255
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig eth0 up
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

After running this, I use iwlist, iwconfig and dhcpcd to connect to my network.