Hey Anas,

I can understand your situation, I lived in Thailand for a long time and they censor the internet. *Very* frustrating!

As somebody else suggested, I'd *strongly* recommend using an SSH -D (dynamic port forward) as a SOCKS proxy. There are a couple of advantages:
1) The traffic is encrypted, so no snooping
2) You can proxy anything you like, including DNS lookups (which you'll probably have to do)

The encryption might be a big deal, depending on how hard your government wants to censor this site. Without encrypting the traffic, it will be obvious that you're accessing the site on another url and so that url will probably get blocked. Or, they introduced a law in Thailand that makes it illegal to bypass the censors, so if there's similar laws, you could face serious consequences.

You may also be able to setup an SSL certificate on your new domain, which could add encryption.

If you're using a linux desktop, checkout the tsocks application. It allows you to launch any other application wrapped in a SOCK proxy. It works beautifully, I use it for all sorts of stuff from my email to IRC / pidgin / etc whenever I'm on an open wifi network.

Best of luck beating the censor! :)

Cheers - Callum.

On 22/12/2007, AN@S <anas@anasonline.net > wrote:
Hi,
I need to use pound as a reverse proxy but not for load balancing this time.
My situation is that I'm from a country that the government here block
websites !
They recently blocked a website that is very important for my friends and
me, and it does not function probably with proxy bypassing websites that
uses scripts like CGIProxy or Phproxy.
The good thing is that I have a dedicated server in the United States. Well
I have some prior experience with Pound when I used it to run Ruby On Rails
with mongrel, but now I'm unable to get the following thing done:

A user requests newdomain.com (which is registered by me and connected to my
server) ---> Pound will get the content of www.theblockedwebsite.com and
deliver it to the end user ---> The browser's URL remains
newdomain.combecause if changed the user will get the ugly "Access
Denied" page.

I did the following basic configuration and it partially worked:

--------------------------------------------

ListenHTTP
        Address 69.89.**.**  ## my server's ip address
        Port 80

        Service

        backend
        address theblockedwebsite.com
        port    80
end
End
End

-------------------------------------------

This scenario didn't fully work because the blocked website uses sub-domains
and I couldn't get them to work correctly.
When you request www.theblockedwebsite.com, it looks for
subdomain.theblockedwebsite.com and gets content from there but in the URL
in the browser remains: theblockedwebsite.com.
In other situations the website uses sub-domains and they do appear in the
URL bar.

Can this be done using Pound? Or should I look for solutions like Squid or
Apache's mod_proxy?

Your help is highly appreciated.

Best Regards

--
Anas Marrawi
Visit me at: www.anasonline.net


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