ShinySOCKS

Mission Statement

*To create a small, ultrafast SOCKS proxy server.

Background

I sometimes use VPN. In one case, I have a VPN access only from a Windows 7 virtual machine trough some proprietary "security by obscurity" VPN software. In order to work efficiently, I need to connect my Linux workstation to that VPN. Network routing and IP forwarding seems not to work, so the second best option in my case is SOCKS. Socks trough Putty works, kind of. It's slow and unreliable.

I tried a few free SOCKS servers. Neither of them worked, so therefore I'm spending a few hours writing my own.

Blog posts mentioning the project

• My blog

Current State

The project is currently in maintainance mode. It just works.

The SOCKS server works for SOCKS 4, 4a and 5 under Linux and Windows (compiled under Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2015 RC and Boost 1.58). IPv6 and binding (reverse connections) are not yet supported.

How I use it

I start ShinySOCKS on the command-line (cmd.exe) in a Windows or Linux VM with VPN. Then I ssh to whatever servers on the VPN network I desire - using ShinySOCKS as a proxy.

From Linux: $ ssh -o ProxyCommand='nc -x 192.168.0.10:1080 %h %p' jgaa@cool-server

For accessing intranet web pages over the VPN, I some times use the Foxy Proxy Firefox plugin. It simplifies things, and make my work-flow smooth. This also improves my privacy, as the VPN host will only see the web traffic going to the intranet sites.

Docker

You can also pull a Docker image with the server from Docker Hub.

docker pull jgaafromnorth/shinysocks

To run it.

docker run --rm --name shiny -p 1080:1080 -d jgaafromnorth/shinysocks

You can now set the socks 5 address to ip 172.17.0.1 port 1080 in your applications (for example Firefox') proxy settings and test it.

License

ShinySOCKS is released under GPLv3. It is Free. Free as in speech. Free as in Free Air.