A couple redditors showed interest in how I set up my Pi as a SOCKS proxy and recommended I make a separate post as a tutorial, so I’ll do my best to explain everything.

Background

SOCKS stands for Socket Secure, and is essentially just a middle man for a server and client for send information between. The best description I’ve heard of it is “It’s a poor man’s VPN.” It essentially works the same, but each service has to be configured to work with it (i.e. I have Firefox on my Mac working through my SOCKS proxy but not Chrome and Safari). Why would you want a SOCKS proxy over a VPN? From my experience, it runs better on a Pi, and I can also do multiple things over SSH (such as also run a file server). Having to configure each service to run through it can also be a pro or a con, depending on if you want everything to work through it or not.

Basic Overview

There’s really not much to setting everything up; it’s a pretty straightforward process. For those just looking for something short and sweet, here are the basic steps I followed. I’ll go over each more in depth below.

Source: RPi as a SOCKS proxy and SSH file server Tutorial (Reddit/Raspberry Pi)