Virtualbox and Squid

PROXYsquid

I'm trying to setup Squid and am having great difficulty (I'm new to all this). Basically, I have a VirtualBox machine which I can ssh in to (eamorr@192.168.56.101). I want this machine (192.168.56.101) to act as a transparent Squid caching server for my host machine.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be most appreciated. Many thanks in advance,

Best Answer

You cannot set it up as a transparent proxy server if it is not connected to the network "before" your host machine.

Well, there is one way. If you have a manageable firewall (other than a standard router) in front of your local network, then you could force all connections on certain ports to go through your virtual machine.

You can use it as a parallel one though.

Related Solutions

Iptables – Transparent Proxy with Squid / iptables

If I understand you correctly, what you want to do isn't going to be handled simply by configuring iptables. The REDIR target can only be used to target processes running on the local system. I believe attempting to use a DNAT target to forward the to the remote squid box would remove some of the information the remote squid box needs to properly handle the request

If you allow me to guess a bit. I think you are trying to leave the default gateway as 192.168.1.1 on your host and then send your port 80 traffic across the vpn right?

The remote squid needs some configuration so that it can actually act as a transparent proxy. If you can setup the correct iptables redirection on the squid host, and the remote host is in the network path, then it is possible to do use some advanced routing to forward all port 80 requests across the vpn.

P.S. If I am understanding your needs correctly add a comment, I can update my answer with more details about how to setup routing.

Selective proxy by DNS using Squid and BIND

Your first, DNS approach seems to be the best of two. To configure this, you should configure your bind as an authoritative server for zone example.com. A piece of BIND config should look nearly so:

zone "example.com" in{
    type master;
    file "pri.example.com";
};

pri.example.com in this example should contain address records for all subdomains of example.com, you want to redirect. Of course, IP address in these records should point to your proxy server.

I'm not absolutely shure, but you may need to configure your squid in "transparent" mode. There are many examples over Internet.

Squid is HTTP, HTTPS, FTP proxy server. But HTTPS is handled with CONNECT http method used. This is why you may use programs like Corkscrew or Proxytunnel These programs utilize CONNECT method for tunneling. There is a problem with CONNECT timeouts - it is described on ProxyTunnel page. The other approach to handling different protocols is redirecting data with iptables. In this case, handling is done on the 3-rd and 4-th OSI levels (address and transport protocols) and level 7 (application layer) isn't touched.

Hope, my answer will direct you to the right decision.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Iptables – Transparent Proxy with Squid / iptables

Selective proxy by DNS using Squid and BIND

Related Topic