Tinyproxy A Quick and Easy Proxy Server on Ubuntu

As much as I think that a fully blown Squid Proxy sat on a network working as a Proxy server and giving virus and content filtering is a great bit of technology, I also appreciate that sometimes something simpler, quicker and easier is required.

I came across an organisation this week that was using a hosted web filter service. They were still having issues with bandwidth utilisation putting their email flow in jeopardy so they needed to do something about it.

Also it can sometimes be very useful to have your internet traffic going via a different IP address, especially useful if you have a VPS server sat in a different country and you want to do things like watch TV from that country…

Tinyproxy as the name suggests is a small footprint proxy server application that has limited functionality compared to Squid but is very easy to configure and run.

Firstly we need to install Tinyproxy from our Ubuntu shell

apt-get install tinyproxy

Accept any requests that come up.

Now, lets edit the default configuration.

nano /etc/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.conf

Optional! – You may want to change the port, I like port 8080 for proxies.

Find the section that reads:

#
# Port to listen on.
#
Port 8888

And change it to:

#
# Port to listen on.
#
Port 8080

Optional! – IF you have multiple IP addresses on the server you may want to change the binding addresses for one inbound and one outbound.

Find the section that reads:

#
# If you have multiple interfaces this allows you to bind to only one. If
# this is commented out, tinyproxy will bind to all interfaces present.
#
#Listen a.b.c.d

#
# The Bind directive allows you to bind the outgoing connections to a
# particular IP address.
#
#Bind w.x.y.z

Change it accordingly.

Optional! – Now, if we’re using an upstream proxy you need the section below.

#
# Turns on upstream proxy support.
#
# The upstream rules allow you to selectively route upstream connections
# based on the host/domain of the site being accessed.
#
# For example:
# # connection to test domain goes through testproxy
# upstream testproxy:8008 “.test.domain.invalid”
# upstream testproxy:8008 “.our_testbed.example.com”
# upstream testproxy:8008 “192.168.128.0/255.255.254.0”
#
# # no upstream proxy for internal websites and unqualified hosts
# no upstream “.internal.example.com”
# no upstream “www.example.com”
# no upstream “10.0.0.0/8”
# no upstream “192.168.0.0/255.255.254.0”
# no upstream “.”
#
# # connection to these boxes go through their DMZ firewalls
# upstream cust1_firewall:8008 “testbed_for_cust1”
# upstream cust2_firewall:8008 “testbed_for_cust2”
#
# # default upstream is internet firewall
# upstream firewall.internal.example.com:80
#
# The LAST matching rule wins the route decision. As you can see, you
# can use a host, or a domain:
# name matches host exactly
# .name matches any host in domain “name”
# . matches any host with no domain (in ’empty’ domain)
# IP/bits matches network/mask
# IP/mask matches network/mask
#
#Upstream some.remote.proxy:port

Add an entry under this line something along the lines of:

proxy.hostedproxy.com:8080

You’ll now need to let Tinyproxy know what the internal IP range of your network is, find the section below.

#
# The following is the authorization controls. If there are any access
# control keywords then the default action is to DENY. Otherwise, the
# default action is ALLOW.
#
# Also the order of the controls are important. The incoming connections
# are tested against the controls based on order.
#
Allow 127.0.0.1
#Allow 192.168.0.0/16
#Allow 172.16.0.0/12
#Allow 10.0.0.0/8

Add an appropriate entry, or uncomment out the appropriate line ie:

Allow 1.2.3.0/32

Now we need to reboot the server.

shutdown -r now

Now set up the proxy server and set the proxy up on the clients and off you go, easy and quick!