16
Jun

How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (Virtual Machine Disk Format!)

Update: Version v0.3 has been posted, thanks James!

Great news all — the wonderful user “xxxxxx” has contributed a Virtual Machine Disk Format to the proxy campaign!

All you need to do is grab a copy of the VMDK file with your favorite web browser (?) BitTorrent program and you’re good to go… pop the disk image on your favorite cloud/vps host and click start.

There are two accounts created on install (you can change both passwords):

(user:password)
root:#iran
iran:election

Could we make it any easier to help? Please tweet your proxies via *DM* @austinheap or e-mail them to me@austinheap.com.

THANK YOU XXXXXX (I don’t know if I can post your name yet, please e-mail me!)

Related posts:

  1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens
  2. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
  3. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Mac!)
  4. Best Proxy Practices (BPP!) and an update
  5. Working Iran Proxy List
Tags Posted under Internets, Iran, Politics by Austin

36 Responses


  • Thanks a lot for posting! I’m gonna install it … for freedom in Iran!

    by: _think, Jun 16th at 3:42 am

  • Hi Austin,

    Wow, you now have VMDK’s. Excellent. You can probably update the instructions to include this link:

    http://www.virtualbox.org/

    That is an open-source virtual machine server.

    Here’s the rub: what are the port forwarding instructions? Do I forward port 3128 from my home firewall to the proxy server IP?

    Also, does the squid on this VMDK make sure that all requests that come in go straight out to the internet (as opposed to being used to hack my home network)? In other words, is the squid on the VMDK configured to refuse any requests to proxy to non-public IP ranges (see chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network)?

    by: Philip Schlesinger, Jun 16th at 8:02 am

  • Is this VM on the VMware Virtual Appliance site yet? http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
    If so, please link; if not, I can upload it if appropriate. This will make it much harder to DDOS, and save you bandwidth…

    Regards,
    Ted T.

    by: Ted Thomas, Jun 16th at 9:02 am

  • P.S. Please post hash keys so we can make sure the VM we get isn’t damaged by possible future DDOS attempts or site hacks.

    Thanks!

    by: Ted Thomas, Jun 16th at 9:11 am

  • I’m gonna install it as well as soon as I’m done studying for midterms!

    by: Faryad, Jun 16th at 9:48 am

  • Is this VM on http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ yet? If so, please post link; if not, I can upload if you want. This could save you bandwidth and help avoid DDOS attacks on your site. Also, please post file hashes for accuracy. This is what I have:

    MD5: 2B1E2E39F140E873FE76622CCD0AE65C
    SHA1: 0BB772C0704FA321451185E3768962E8D9C27367

    Are these correct?

    (This is a repost; I think my first ones were lost; if not, please delete them.)

    Thanks for your work!
    Ted T.

    by: Ted Thomas, Jun 16th at 10:47 am

  • If you don’t have a VPS and wanted to drop some change to help the people of Iran for a month, could you recommend a VPS host?

    by: Mazuhl, Jun 16th at 11:38 am

  • Same question as Mazuhl. Any recommended VPS hosts?

    by: thatalias, Jun 16th at 12:35 pm

  • Is there a guide on how to set this up manually? I have a small VPS that I would like to use for this purpose but I don’t think it would a good idea to install a virtual machine within a VPS.

    by: Gerd, Jun 16th at 4:42 pm

  • So I did this on my desktop. How do I find my proxy info to send? just my ip address? what ports am I using?

    by: Confused, Jun 16th at 6:55 pm

  • I’m very touched by your support for the Iraninan People and there Revolution, Against the Brutal Criminal Governmen. Thank You!

    by: Schulz, Jun 16th at 7:08 pm

  • I downloaded ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk and have tried to boot it using both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox on Mac OS X and am getting stuck with a message that says “kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot…” and the the VM hangs and never boots. Any ideas?

    by: dg, Jun 16th at 7:24 pm

  • You sure have done a great job–we linked and informed a lot of folks about your kindly/generous actions/ no good deeds go without some kind of reward–thanks dude..
    for freedom in iran–

    by: hooshang d, Jun 16th at 8:34 pm

  • I’ve set up VirtualBox with a Linux/Debian machine and I am using the provided ProxyBox.

    After the machine boots, am I supposed to see something in the window?

    by: Sean, Jun 16th at 8:36 pm

  • I’m confused. I spent two days getting squid to work. I’m don’t know much about computers. What’s a VPS? I googled it and I still don’t understand. Does Austin still need squid proxies?

    by: Penguin, Jun 16th at 9:47 pm

  • In the same situation as Penguin. Do you still need my squid running?

    by: oriste, Jun 16th at 11:34 pm

  • What ports have to be open? Just outbound ping?

    by: Casey, Jun 17th at 11:33 am

  • Anyone have this working? I booted it with Sun VirtualBox and it’s stuck at:
    kinit: trying to resume from /dev/hda5
    kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot…

    by: Rich, Jun 17th at 12:44 pm

  • File hashes I have for ProxyBox_v0.3:

    MD5: 5B6AD32270FA4E635E14DD70AA0BF4E1
    SHA1: DC46619AA37EBFE90E7C816053C3D3C17762F4F8

    Please confirm.

    Confused:
    To run a proxy server others can use, you must have a static IP. That is, your external IP address must not change over time. Normally, unless you make arrangements with your ISP, they will change your external address periodically. You can find your current external IP by going to http://www.IPChicken.com/ on the PC you plan to use. Remember that if you run a proxy that the Iranian govt. discovers, you may lose connectivity for a time because of a DDOS attack from them. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they are hiring hacker botnets to do this right now. This is, after all, a war…)

    dg: and Rich:
    This appears to be a problem with the order in which the VM checks partitions at startup. See http://www.thekip.nl/2007/12/18/kinit-no-resume-image-fixed/ for details. You will need to know how to open & use a terminal window to fix this. Perhaps the VM author, James, could post on this one…

    Penguin: and oriste:
    This VM does the same thing as squid (probably uses it, actually); it is just a different way to provide the same relay service.

    HTHs,
    Ted T.

    by: Ted Thomas, Jun 17th at 2:28 pm

  • Thanks for your response, Ted.

    I don’t have a static IP and I think I don’t know enough about this to really help out. I d/l’d the VMDK thing and neither me nor my computer knows what to do with it. This is maybe a little out of my league.

    But’s it’s awesome to see so that so many people care and want to do pitch in! I think my faith in humanity has been restored.

    by: Penguin, Jun 17th at 6:46 pm

  • Can you let us know shat the specs on the .vmdk are? What ports does it run on &c?

    by: flamsmark, Jun 17th at 8:43 pm

  • Ted:
    I don’t have a static address (home DSL), though I do have DynDNS pointing to my box. Is an actual hard ip addr needed, or will my DynDNS url work?

    by: Hugh, Jun 17th at 9:50 pm

  • Does this VMDK follow the BPP post guidlines, and if not, what do we need to do to change it?

    by: bendodge, Jun 17th at 10:10 pm

  • I have made some progress using the vmdk file on Centos with vmware server. Initially, before trying to install it as an VM in the server via the remote https interface, I tried to mount the vmdk image locally but was unable to do so. After conversion with

    vmware-vdiskmanager -r ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk -t 0 Proxy.vmdk

    mounting worked fine using

    vmware-mount Proxy.vmdk 1 /mnt/

    After unmounting (‘vmware-mount -x’), I configured the VM within vmware server to use this virtual disk as a virtual disk for a new Debian 32bit VM. I also added a NAT network interface and a CD/CD-ROM drive using the default settings. However, during boot, the remote console showed that the /dev/hda1 disk could not be found.

    To fix this, I stopped the VM, re-mounted the vmdk and edited /etc/fstab as well as /boot/grub/menu.lst to change all instances of /dev/hda[15] to /dev/sda[15]. After unmounting, the VM booted fine, grabbed an IP address and seems to be running all services (mix, tor, ziproxy, and squid).

    Since my VM host is behind a firewall, I will need to research some additional information to make this one available.

    Thanks for making this available!!!

    by: sunkid, Jun 18th at 4:19 pm

  • all instructions for the VMDK are here: http://www.exstatic.org/proxybox/

    by: sunkid, Jun 19th at 10:51 am

  • @sunkid

    Something is wrong, I get the following error no matter where I have the .ovf and .dmvk files.
    http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/3244/errorfyb.png
    Notice how the extra, incorrect / is being added in? I’ve duplicated this error on a Windows XP machine and a Windows 7 machine having the two files together in multiple directories including the root of my hard disk and the error still persists.

    by: fjl, Jun 20th at 8:05 pm

  • Hey sunkid, I got your thing setup and running but I having 2 problems

    1) when I run the socat command, it seems to “hang” (as in, I get a bunch of text but then I no longer get a command line). Is this normal?

    2) Although I’ve forwarded all the ports, when I use a web proxy checker it says that the proxy is not working. Any help or further instructions would be appreciated.

    I’m running vista 64, Ive shut down my antivirus software and im on a wired connection.

    by: green, Jun 21st at 2:34 am

  • oh and im not using a router or firewall software atm, trying to eliminate all sources of the conflict

    by: green, Jun 21st at 2:46 am

  • Has anyone got this up and gotten a ddos attack? I want to do it, but just want to know what the ramifications will be. Will I be offline for an extended period of time? Can I expect hacks or virus’s on other systems on my network? Just want to get a feel for what to expect. Anyone have any problems out there?

    by: z26o, Jun 21st at 1:21 pm

  • If one doesn’t have a static IP, use dyndns (http://dyndns.org) or no-ip (http://www.no-ip.com/)

    This way you direct an url to your home ip that gets updated from within your computer.

    Unless they block all the available domain types (a lot at dyndns)

    Check it out!

    by: olli, Jun 21st at 6:10 pm

  • I want to help, but I’m really unsure how to do this. I have an available PC at home with ethernet connection that I don’t use for anything. Is there an idiot’s guide for someone who has no clue about proxies and DNS to help set some up?

    by: Clueless, Jun 22nd at 1:03 am

  • Hello, I’ve got the same MD5 and SHA1 sums that Ted Thomas has reported on ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk:
    $ md5sum ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk ; sha1sum ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk
    5b6ad32270fa4e635e14dd70aa0bf4e1 ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk
    dc46619aa37ebfe90e7c816053c3d3c17762f4f8 ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk

    However, my installation of VirtualBox (the one that ships with Ubuntu 9.04 – virtualbox-ose-2.1.4-dfsg-1ubuntu3) doesn’t accept this image:

    Could not open the hard disk ‘/home/hackiran/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk’.
    VMDK: incorrect version in sparse extent header in ‘/home/hackiran/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk’, not a VMDK 1.0 conforming file (VERR_VD_VMDK_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION).
    VD: error opening image file ‘/home/hackiran/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/ProxyBox_v0.3.vmdk’ (VERR_VD_VMDK_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION).

    Result Code:
    NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005)
    Component:
    HardDisk2
    Interface:
    IHardDisk2 {ed6e2525-c2fd-42a4-917a-7a9045ac9e15}
    Called function:
    IVirtualBox {339abca2-f47a-4302-87f5-7bc324e6bbde}

    Seems that the header of the image is invalid. Any idea how to fix the image for VirtualBox?

    by: Hackiran, Jun 24th at 12:58 am

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