Linux-tips

Network proxies can be useful. Maybe you want private browsing or proxied IM connections. Maybe you'd like to filter ads for your entire LAN including browsers without adblock support. All this and more can be accomplished using privoxy and
tor.

On Debian based systems: apt-get install privoxy tor

Take a look at /etc/privoxy/config - you need to set a listen address for you LAN and/or your ip in place of domain.org for remote access. You may want to adjust email address and hostname also. Here's a sample config file.

For additional privacy, we can forward connections from privoxy to tor. Add this line to the privoxy config file (be sure to include the trailing . ):

forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

It's already been added at bottom in the sample privoxy file. This assumes you set tor to run on localhost port 9050 - which is the default. Restart privoxy after making any changes:

/etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Point any program on the LAN (or outside network if enabled) to the ip/domain and port privoxy runs on, http proxy. In the provided example this is:

192.168.0.1:8118 or for remote access domain.org:8118 (obviously you'll need to adjust domain.org to your ip)

lire is a groovy little tool for generating html or text reports from syslogs. Debian users can: apt-get install lire

to list log types lire handles:

lr_log2report --help dlf-converters

generate a html report from apache logs:

lr_log2report --output html combined /var/log/apache2/access.log apache_report

generate a txt report from apache logs:

lr_log2report combined /var/log/apache2/access.log apache_report.txt

generate a html syslog report:

lr_log2report --output html syslog /var/log/syslog syslog_report