Tim Dobson

You may have read recently about attempts to block the Pirate Bay.

There are a variety of reasons I think this is a bad idea, perhaps I’ll write a post about it, but this is simply about how to quickly and easily deploy a web proxy for a specific website which could be anywhere in the world.

This is REALLY quick and simple. Let’s go!

1) Go to LowEndBox.com and buy a cheap VM of your choice.

• The more exotic the location the better, though even the UK should work.
• The specification doesn’t matter, though 128MB of RAM or more will be best.
• Don’t accept anything with less 15GB monthly bandwidth
• I’d expect, even at peak, your proxy to use less that 500MB/month – well within most limits.
• Be aware of your provider’s T’s & C’s. They may not like you.

NOTE: For other uses, I’d recommend networks with more reliable reputations than simply “is cheap” – ability to reimage, console access, awesome support – this time none of those are required.

2) Request Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 as the server OS

• You could use other things, we’re going to use Debuntu.

3) Login as root. If you’re not root, you can always “sudo -s” for root.

Let’s update the machine and install the nginx – the program that we’re going to be using.

• apt-get update

• apt-get dist-upgrade -y

• apt-get install nginx -y

4) Let’s configure your DNS before we go further. I’m assuming you have a domain – yourdomain.com. Go to your domain’s DNS records and create an “A” record called tpb.yourdomain.com, with your server’s IP address as the details. The TTL doesn’t matter, but generally you’ll prefer smaller to larger. Save that, and let’s get back to the server!

5 ) Let’s configure nginx:

• nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/tpb.config
• Paste in :
  server {
  listen THESERVERSIPADDRESS:80;

  server_name tpb.yourdomain.com;
  location / {
  proxy_pass  http://thepiratebay.se/;
  }
  access_log /dev/null;
  error_log  /dev/null;
  }

Obviously, you’ll need to change tpb.yourdomain.com and YOURSERVERSIPADDRESS to what they actually are.

To save this, type ctrl-o, *enter* ctrl-x.

6) You can now configure SSL if you want, or leave it unconfigured as it is. I’m not going to cover this here, right now, but it’s a nice touch.

7) Run:

• /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Hopefully nginx should restart without errors. If there are errors, look at them carefully and try and understand where you might need to go back to.

Go to tpb.yourdomain.com – hopefully your DNS changes will have been noticed by now and that should work nicely.

9) Publicise your URL to your friends and family.

10) Introduce someone else to these instructions.