Proxy Scripts Part 2
Website Description: This CGI script acts as an HTTP or FTP proxy. Through it, you can retrieve any resource that is accessible from the server it runs on. This is useful when your own access is limited, but you can reach a server that in turn can reach others that you can’t. In addition, the user is kept as anonymous as possible from any servers. Common uses include: anonymous proxies similar to The Anonymizer, other personal uses, VPN-like functionality, and others. It’s very simple to install, and very configurable.
When an HTML resource is retrieved, it’s modified so that all links in it point back through the same proxy, including images, form submissions, and everything else. Once you’re using the proxy, you can browse normally and (almost) forget it’s there
Advantages:
Uses up less bandwidth than PHProxy
Quick and easy to setup
Simple to use, just upload the files, type in the web address and go
Allows login to most websites
Disadvantages:
Uses a lot of CPU Processing power
Need a server that can run the CGI Proxy (may need to be configured whereas most Linux servers have PHP automatically)
If Im honest I’ve never fully utilized this proxy and some of the disadvantages may not be fully true as they are not from personal experience just from “the talk of the web”. Give it a try and see what you think.
Some others
Of course there are other scripts out there, heres some links to others you may want to check out:
May 17th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Actually, the CPU usage problem occurs only when you use the script as a regular CGI script. If you configure your Web server with mod_perl, CGI Proxy doesn’t use much CPU at all. This is because mod_perl compiles the script into bytecode for fast execution, it’s something like Zend does for PHP.
June 3rd, 2007 at 3:53 am
Hello, this is the owner of http://zelune.net (Free zelune download, the post you linked to), and I just wanted to stop by and say that this is a good post.
If you would like a comparison (non-biased) I did on Zelune vs PHP vs CGI, let me know via email.
January 24th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Also just as a side note remember it is extremely important to do a proper robots.txt for your proxy if you don’t then your proxy will crawl the web and google will index other peoples websites under your domain. This seems great but its pretty unethical if you ask me and causes a lot more problems then the benefits of fresh content.
Here is the proper format for PHProxy 5
User-agent: *
Disallow : /index.php?
Just put that in your robots.txt file and upload it to the root of your server.
There are other ones for cgi proxy and glype.
If your worried you can’t do well in the Search Engines without stealing content check out my site at http://www.proxybolt.com and I guarantee you I am doing very well in the SE’s and have a ton of visitors without having to steal.