Installing Privoxy

A task I'm going to blog shortly recommends that I install Privoxy. I encounted some troubles using FreeBSD so I thought I would document them.

First I installed the package.

orr:/root# pkg_add -vr privoxy
...edited...
Running pre-install for privoxy-3.0.3_4..
extract: Package name is privoxy-3.0.3_4
extract: CWD to /usr/local
extract: /usr/local/man/man1/privoxy.1.gz
extract: /usr/local/sbin/privoxy
extract: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/config
extract: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/default.action
extract: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/default.filter
extract: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/trust
...edited...

***********************************************************
** Before running privoxy you must modify the file       **
** /usr/local/etc/privoxy/config                         **
**                                                       **
** Start privoxy with:                                   **
** /usr/local/sbin/privoxy /usr/local/etc/privoxy/config **
**                                                       **
** For documentation see:                                **  
** /usr/local/share/doc/privoxy-manual or 'man privoxy'  **
***********************************************************

Next I enabled Privoxy in /etc/rc.conf.

orr:/root# echo "privoxy_enable=YES" >> /etc/rc.conf

Next I tried starting Privoxy. I ran into some problems that I fixed with the following:

orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# mkdir /var/run/privoxy
orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# chown privoxy:privoxy /var/run/privoxy
orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# mkdir /var/log/privoxy
orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# chown privoxy:privoxy /var/log/privoxy

Here's what Privoxy looks like while running.

orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# ./privoxy start
Starting privoxy.
orr:/usr/local/etc/rc.d# sockstat -4
USER     COMMAND    PID   FD PROTO  LOCAL ADDRESS         FOREIGN ADDRESS      
privoxy  privoxy    40053 3  tcp4   127.0.0.1:8118        *:*
richard  firefox-bi 37850 22 tcp4   192.168.2.5:62936     66.249.83.83:80
richard  ssh        691   3  tcp4   192.168.2.5:49499     172.16.3.2:22
root     sendmail   468   4  tcp4   127.0.0.1:25          *:*
root     sshd       462   4  tcp4   *:22                  *:*
root     syslogd    320   7  udp4   *:514                 *:*

So what is this good for? Well, now that I have Privoxy listening on port 8118 TCP I can point my Web browser toward it. I tell Firefox to use localhost port 8118 and now all my Web requests use Privoxy.

I can test the difference between normal Web browsing and Privoxy Web browsing by visiting http://config.privoxy.org/show-status. It shows information like the following.

Show-Request



Here you see the original headers that your client sent when requesting this page, along with the headers that Privoxy would have sent to the remote server if this request hadn't been intercepted.


Original Client Request:


GET http://config.privoxy.org/show-request HTTP/1.1
Host: config.privoxy.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7)
 Gecko/20060917 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,
 text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://config.privoxy.org/show-status
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:25:41 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0

Processed Request:


GET /show-request HTTP/1.1
Host: config.privoxy.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) 
 Gecko/20060917 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,
 text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Referer: http://config.privoxy.org/
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:25:41 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0
X-Actions-File-Version: 1.8
Connection: close

This doesn't appear to be a big deal, but I'm using Privoxy's default configuration. In my next post I'll combine Privoxy with Tor to facilitate (but not guarantee) anonymous Web browsing.

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