Someone tell me how to set up a basic public HTTP proxy

[Bobmuhthol]

I've set up a proxy server and an SSH server, but both of them are inaccessible outside of my own PC. I have no idea what I'm doing, I suck with anything related to servers, and I'm going to run it on an XP installation with only 1 account and no password.

That said, I need the most primitive thing possible to be able to bypass blocked sites on a school network.

[Celephais]

I've never set one up myself, but I that sounds like you're having firewall issues with your local PC, the first two things to check would be your Machine's firewall (you're not SP2 are you?) and then the router... Then try using telnet to see if you can open a port from an outside machine.

If you mean that the Proxy Server isn't listening to the port, despite it being open, check your administrative tools/services to see if it's running. Like I said I've never set one up but I can't imagine it's far off from setting up any other "server" service on XP. I've had problems with XP forgetting settings and being a huge pain in the ass when setting up FTP, but no issues with any of the server OSes... proxy servers aren't exactly demanding, can't you get some old shitty PC and install windows server on it?

Can't you just use one of the free proxy servers you can find online?

[Bobmuhthol]

Absolutely no firewall is being used, and the proper ports are forwarded when applicable. I've followed instructions to the letter (Cygwin and Privoxy) but can't get either to do anything on a WAN.

And no, I can't use a free proxy, because they absolutely blow. And because my school's brilliant filtering technique was to block any website with the string "proxy" -- I get fucked if I try to search for "proxylophones" on Google. The proxy isn't even really for me, but for friends who are stuck at the school in the library with nothing to do. Retarded attendance policies are lol.

[BigWorm]

How are you trying to access them from outside your network?

[Bobmuhthol]

Internet.

For SSH I tried to pull an ssh://ip but that didn't work, for the proxy I don't really remember, I just remember not being able to set it up correctly. The programs I'm trying don't seem to be designed to do what I want; I probably only need some sort of PHP or Java script to be able to do it.

Also, I can't use the proxy settings in IE (lol, school administration!), so it has to be totally browser based. Right now people are using http://www.calculatepie.com/ so it should be pretty much a carbon copy of that but without ads and not suck.

[Sylvan Dreams]

We have ISA at work (I work for my state's dept of education). I found a loophole that allows pages to bypass ISA if accessed via: http://www.google.com/xhtml

Another free public proxy that I found students using was www.guardster.com (http://www.guardster.com)