help! proxy servers!? alt workarounds?

[alexcellent]

Hi all I am currently studying abroad and the country I am visiting has blocked certain websites that are an integral part of my existence.

Can someone give me a walkthrough of what to do? I've googled for about 3 hours and came across squid and a bunch of other proxy servers, but I'm totally confused at this point. I'm pretty sure a regular web-based proxy isn't going to cut it, so I've tried to install one of these applications that act as a proxy. But somewhere along the process when I try to install the proxy, it just asks for a bunch of terminal commands which don't actually work onmy machine. I'm running 10.5.

please help me !!!


Alex

 

[occamsrazor]

It depends what country and what type of blocking they are doing...
If the blocking isn't too severe, you might want to look at using a commercial VPN provider instead of a proxy.
I use Witopia with their OpenVPN service (much better than the PPTP option which is easily blocked) using Viscosity as a vpn client (you could also use Tunnelblick) and am pretty happy. It's got past most blocks as they have an option to connect via TCP Port 443 which very few places block.
That said there is one place I know that blocks/filters/slowsdown all 443 traffic... so it wouldn't be of use there.
You could try using Tor but you may find it's pretty slow...
If the filtering is really severe you might have to try one of the (unfortunately Windows-only) anti-blocking software like FreeGate but that may not work everywhere.

Edit: If you need a free option you could try HotSpotShield to see if it is blocked or not

 

[alexcellent]

thanks a lot for the quick response... i was looking at some of those paid services but I was hoping to figure out a free work around... any suggestions?

by the way the country just held the 08 Olympics hint hint.

 

[occamsrazor]

Freegate is really your best bet then.... shame it is Windows-only. It works well, is free, is almost unblockable, and is fast.
Presumably you could run it in BootCamp or with VMware etc.. though with a virtualised solution like VMWare I'm not sure you can "pass back" the proxied connection to the Mac OS X side.
I believe Witopia works there, you might want to email the company to ask though... depends how long you will be there, but for $60 a year it's not a bad deal. Try Hotspotshield for free, see if it works... if it does am pretty sure Witopia will work...

 

[occamsrazor]

One other option... if you have a tech-savvy friend in the west with a fast connection, you could ask them to set up a VPN server on their machine, then you VPN in to their computer and proxy through it.
And another option - http://www.raynersoftware.com/netshade/
But really... VPNs are a lot easier than proxies as they give system-wide access to the unfiltered connection, rather than having to tell each application too look at the proxy address.