VPS hosting is very configurable. One can do things that were not imaginable before. One of such cool things is your own private proxy server.

Whether you need to do some things anonymously in internet, or you want to see how does a landing page looks, of an affiliate marketing offer, accessible only from a country you are not living in, but your VPS server is...

This is exactly the situation a felt myself in last couple of weeks, I was using internet proxy web pages, like hacksurfing.com or any other, but they are not always working correctly. Imagine, that the affiliate redirect link contains a little more complicated redirecting link done in javascript, which is far too much for hacksurfing to parse, and there is completely nothing you can do about that. (If you don't have a VPS, of course)

Lately I've been trying to find out how to configure a proxy on my JaguarPC VPS.

I have found some articles on internet but they were too common for me.

Here is a complete solution for you...

Configuration of apache private proxy on VPS

On JaguarPC VPS we have apache httpd service, and I think this private proxy configuration will work for anyone with apache. I have a plesk configuration, but I guess that doesn't matter, the private proxy is configured at apache level.

vi your apache configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

find the proxy section which starts with ‹IfModule mod_proxy.c›. If you are reading this article, then probably that whole section in that file is commented out. Uncomment it. That's it, for a first step.

But...

It might not be wise to leave this proxy open to everyone, because it will be immediately used by hackers to hide their identity and do their evil plans :). Who will be guilty in this case? You, of course!

So we have to add this code: "Allow from 127.0.0.1" into that section. Meaning that traffic is allowed from local host only.

restart the httpd deamon: "apachectl -k restart"

Here is how that private proxy configuration section should look at the end:

note that I used ProxyVia Block, which tells the private proxy server not to tell anyone that it is a proxy. I don't really know whether it's really important, but I like things look real :)

We are going to access the proxy via ssh tunnel, using a ssh program that supports tunnels. I always recommend putty, it really has everything!

So, open PuTTY, type your vps server's name in the host and go to tunnels section of putty's interface. Configure the tunnel so it maps your local port, let's say 8080, to remote http port: 80.
it should read:

source port: 8080
destination: localhost:80

When you connect to your VPS server with these settings, it will create a secure data tunnel, which we will use to access our private proxy configured at our VPS.

In your web browser, go to proxy servers configuration and type localhost:8080 as the proxy server name.

That's it!

When you visit some page, your browser goes through the secure tunnel made between putty and vps, then the data comes out of the tunnel at remote port 80, which is then correctly handled by the private proxy we've configured before!