Better Living Through Thinking

SOCKS5 Proxy Server on FreeBSD

Tue, 31 Oct 2006

For several years I ran the Dante proxy server and was generally happy with it. I chose it mainly because it was easy to install from FreeBSD ports, and had a few good tutorials on how to use it.

I rarely had to restart it, but I noticed that it forked a lot of processes for various tasks (probably tunable, but I never learned how to tune it), and was not always reliable (I'd have to sometimes retry my local connection to it several times).

For the past month or so I've been using nylon for my proxy and have been even more pleased with how it has worked.

Nylon is fast and small. It seems to keep its children under control, not spawning more than it needs to keep its connections up. It's config file is also fairly minimal and easy to understand, though I'm not sure it is as flexible as Dante, it meets my simple needs perfectly well. Highly recommended as a first SOCKS5 proxy.