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I am a college student and I can't visit some websites in campus such as youtube and facebook. Can I use OpenVPN as a proxy? I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit.

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closed as off topic by ghoti, Tim Cooper, rene, Ted Hopp, Michal Klouda Oct 21 '12 at 17:21


This is not a programming question and is better suited for AskUbuntu.com or unix.stackexchange.com –  Bert Oct 21 '12 at 13:37

1 Answer 1

OpenVPN provides a network connection. You can run a proxy through that connection, but OpenVPN is not proxy software. If you are able to connect to the outside world via SSH, then you should look at SSH's -D option. SOCKS5 proxy service is built in to SSH.

If you really want to use OpenVPN, you'll need to make sure that your university isn't blocking outbound access on port 1194 (or you could perhaps run OpenVPN on a non-standard port). Then, once you have a connection established using OpenVPN, you'd connect through it to an HTTP proxy like tinyproxy.

I think the SSH option is easier though.

ssh -D1080 -f username@somehost

Then tell your browser to find a SOCKS proxy on localhost:1080.

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