Hi,

My brother and cousins are having trouble connecting to many websites due to recent actions of the Iranian government on banning a lot of websites.

That's why, I decided to make my computer act like a bridge for their computers, so that they can surf the web using my Internet connection in US.

I have Arch linux running on my desktop. I tried to install OpenVPN based on the instructions at ArchWiki page, but I had no success. I guess OpenVPN is too much for what I want to achieve and ArchLinux repositories don't have all the necessary packages to configure it based on some posts I read.

I was wondering if there's any other (easy) way for achieving my goal?

Thanks in advance

It sounds like you simply want your machine to act as a proxy for their browsers. There are a number of ways to do that, but the most popular and best documented would be to install Squid.

The Arch Linux Wiki has a page on Squid, which should get you started.

Does it have any packet encryption? I'm not quite sure, but if they filter websites based on packets, it won't work for me.

I just found out that I can use SSH for that, too. Now waiting for my cousin to see if he's able to configure his windows machine to create tunnel to my SSH server.

I know the Chinese are filtering content based on the actual content of packets now (scanning them all for keywords that are deemed subversive or otherwise undesirable), but I can't say I know how they are doing it in Iran.

You could use an encrypted SSH tunnel, which is actually just another form of proxy, to avoid any packet sniffing going on. Windows is not capable of this out of the box however, you would need something like PuTTY.

Proxy support is built into Windows, so it would be easier to test that first and see if it works. If it doesn't, then worry about getting the more complicated SSH setup working.