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brazzmonkey

Member

From: between keyboard and chair

Registered: 2006-03-16

Posts: 818

How to get polipo proxy to transparently handle web traffic?

hello there,

I've got a router PC at home. It runs privoxy so that any PC on my local network can browse the Internet in a reasonably secure way, with no ads and such.
Because we often visit the same websites, I thought that's be a good thing to set up a caching proxy. I tried Squid, but found it difficult to configure, slow to start, etc. so I finally chose polipo, which is much lighter and simpler.

On the web, many sources advise to have to following setup:
1) local -- privoxy -- polipo -- internet
I got such a setup, but I'd like to try the following instead:
2) local -- polipo -- privoxy -- internet

In my opinion it's more relevant because:
- my router is quite old, and I think it would be lighter on resources to serve already privoxied cached pages, rather than having privoxy process every cached page
- in terms of privacy, it's generally advised not to have a parent proxy on top of privoxy

Privoxy acts as an intercepting proxy, so setup 1) was quite easy to configure. Web traffic is redirected to privoxy, then privoxy forwards it to polipo.

Polipo does not act as an intercepting proxy, because its developer considers that "interception proxying is a fundamentally broken design [...], and will not be supported by Polipo". So far, the only possible workaround I found are :
- configure browsers to use polipo: not suitable, I want any local network computer to be able to transparently connect to the internet
- use yet another proxy to intercept traffic...
- or, from polipo docs :

If you want to use interception proxying in order to avoid manually configuring your clients, please use Netscape's proxy.pac auto-configuration (you don't need a separate web server, as a proxy.pac file can be served by Polipo's internal server).

It gives link pointing to http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/ … -live.html which is dead.

So, in short: is there a way to transparently route my web traffic through polipo?

Thanks for any guidance.

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what goes up must come down

brazzmonkey

Member

From: between keyboard and chair

Registered: 2006-03-16

Posts: 818

Re: How to get polipo proxy to transparently handle web traffic?

hopeless bump...

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what goes up must come down

brenix

Member

From: California

Registered: 2008-03-05

Posts: 185

Re: How to get polipo proxy to transparently handle web traffic?

Not sure if your still looking for a solution, but I could think of a couple possible ways to redirect the traffic. One would be rinetd (Here). The other solution I thought would be iptables (FW_REDIRECT ??), but I have not tried that.

I might try experimenting with a few ways, but let me know if you have it working..