Wiki:packages/polipo.en

Using with Tor

  1. Add socksParentProxy=localhost:9050 to Additional options
  2. Point your browser http proxy to 192.168.178.1:8123
  3. Set No proxy for to localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.178.0/24

(assuming default configuration)

If you use Firefox, use Tor Button to prevent DNS leakage (and other privacy problems with cookies, plugins, etc).

Using at your office

Maybe your internet access at your office (school, internet café, etc) is restricted, filtered and/or monitored and you don't want that. In my case Trend Micro OfficeScan blocks a lot of web-sites as false positives (including www.ip-phone-forum.de). A solution is this:

  1. Install Polipo and dropbear (or another tunnel package)
  2. Forward port 22 (and/or 80 if port 22 is blocked) to localhost:22 using AVM-firewall
  3. Create an SSH tunnel from your office to your FritzBox, for example using putty
  4. Configure your browser at your office to use the http proxy localhost:8123 (assuming default Polipo configuration)

It is not an bad idea to restrict the memory Polipo will use with the following additional option:

chunkHighMark=1048576

Security

Unless you restrict the IP addresses that can access dropbear, my advice is to disable password login and to use host-based authentication.

It is also possible to encapsulate SSH traffic using STunnel, for cases where only http/https traffic is allowed.

Beware that DNS requests could still be monitored, see the section about Tor about how to prevent this. (it is possible to use Tor Button without Tor)

It is possible to tighten security by using these options:

tunnelAllowedPorts=443;allowedPorts=80,443

This prevent tunneling through the proxy and access to the freetz web interface.

Blocking domains

Using the extra options it is possible to specify a file with forbidden domains, like this:

forbiddenFile=/var/media/ftp/uFlash/polipo/forbidden

Add the domains you want to block on separate lines, like this:

doubleclick.net
googleadservices.com
google-analytics.com
googlesyndication.com
facebook.com/plugins

Issues

  • Download of large files is broken and wont be fixed: ticket