Pre requisites

• You need to have Wine installed in your Linux Distribution.
• Incase you face any problem with DLL issues, use the solution given in this troubleshoot tutorial.

How to use Ultrasurf in Linux

• Download Ultrasurf (most often comes in a archive .zip file), extract the file to a specific destination.
• In my case I have extracted it to the Downloads directory in Ubuntu.
• Open Ultrasurf (.exe) file with Wine Program Loader.
• The below window pops up, click on the Options icon and select Proxy Settingsto set your network proxy settings.
  

  UltraSurf running on Ubuntu with Wine

• Click on Ok to apply the settings. Ultrasurf has now been configured. A status message saying ‘Successfully connected to the server’ will appear if the proxy settings you gave are valid.
• Now you need to change the proxy setting of your browser to connect through Ultrasurf. The proxy settings that must been given in the browser are (IP Address : 127.0.0.1) and (Port : 9666).
  

  Proxy Settings in Linux Ultrasurf

• Your browser and ultrasurf is configured and you are now free to open all blocked websites in your network.

P.S. Incase your college network has restriction on download file size (eg. you cannot download a file greater than 15 mb), ultrasurf gets rid of this problem for you. So no more ‘The request or reply is too large’.

Also you cannot use ultrasurf to download torrents.

Proxy Settings in Google Chrome for Ultrasurf

Proxifier

This is the probably the best and the fastest of the three proxy softwares. Proxifier works on MacOS and in Windows. Using proxifier you can connect using the HTTPS or the SOCKS proxy. Proxifier lets you browse any blocked websites. The good thing is you could download torrents in your restricted internet. There is no Linux version of Proxifier and its not compatible with WINE or other emulators.

Proxifier

UltraSurf

This proxy isn’t that fast as compared to Proxifier. Ultrasurf is completely free to use. Torrent download is somehow not possible using Ultrasurf. The good thing is it runs on Linux with WINE emulator. So if you are Linux user, you can very well use this.

Ultrasurf

Tor

Tor project is one of the widely proxy softwares. Tor supports Windows, Linux, MacOS. The best thing is you can use Tor to bypass restrictions in your smartphones too. The bad thing is the speed. Tor is the slowest of all three applications listed here. Torrent downloads are possible using Tor, if readers insist we would also like to write a tutorial for that.

Restrictions are made to maintain some order in the workspace, but breaking them for a good purpose is never wrong. I hope that these applications will solve your network restrictions problem. In our next tutorial we will introduce how to bypass file size limit restrictions made using Squid and other firewall services.

Tor

Set Proxy Settings in Download Accelerator Plus – DAP

1. Open DAP Main Window.
2. In DAP Menu bar choose Tools and then Options. (You can alternatively right click on DAP icon in System tray and select Options).
   

   Dap Proxy

3. Select Proxy in the Left panel window.
4. In the Right panel, set the proxy setting in HTTP as well as FTP. Incase if your proxy required Authentication, enter the Username and password (for the proxy) in the given space. Incase if the proxy doesn’t require authentication, the username and password fields can be ignored.
5. Click on close  and re-download all the files that are already queued in the Download Manager.

Download Failures

Sometimes the institution application like Squid that can block the Torrent and Download Managers traffic, such case when you are downloading files through Proxy, the download may either fail or request for Authentication. Such case there are alternate ways to tunnel the traffic and download through DAP, which will be explained in the coming tutorials.

How to Set Proxy For Gtalk

1. Open Gtalk Windows, In the Top Right click on Settings link.
2. In the Left Panel choose the option Connections.
3. In the Right Panel change the option to “Use the Following Proxy”
4. In the Host you need to enter the IP address or the host domain address (Eg. 192.16.3.254 ).
5. In the Port enter the port number of the Proxy (Eg: 8080)
6. Some proxies would require authentication to sign in. Such case Enable the Proxy Requires Authenticaiton checkbox.
7. In the user name and password enter the required details.
8. Click on OK button and now sign in with Gtalk. It will work

How does DNS Website Blocking Work ?

The TCP/IP protocol in Windows contains a file called “hosts“  that contains the mapping of the website to a particular IP address. Whatever DNS address you may use in your router or modem or your TCP/IP properties in Network Connection, they will be overridden by the IP mapping done in this “host” file. So by simply mapping any website to a dummy IP we can block the particular website from loading in the browser.

How to block a website using DNS

1. Open the folder “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc“
2. In that folder you can find a file by the name “hosts“, right click on the file and open it with notepad or any other text editor.
   

   IP Mapping

3. As in the above show image, the last lines represents the IP mapping, so add the IP address “127.0.0.1″ followed by the website that you want to block.
4. The address “127.0.0.1″ is the localhost address, (you can specify any other dummy IP in that place if you want to )
5. Save the File
6. Restart your Browser and now you can find that the website you have added will fail to load.

How to check if a website is blocked by DNS

There are many ways by which you can find whether a website has been blocked to you or not. Following are some of the methods by which you can find out.

Direct Host File Lookup

Nothing can be much easier than this method, to check the website is blocked by DNS or not, just open the host file specified in the folder “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc” , However administrators are smart enough, they would have already restricted you from viewing the System Files, In those cases you got to try the following methods.

Down for Everyone Or Just Me

This is one of the mostly viewed website to detect if a website is not available just to you or to everyone. Enter the website that you want to check and there you can find out if the site has been blocked. However this method cannot precisely determine if its blocked because of the DNS. There may be several ways by which ca website can be blocked ,DNS is one such way.

IP Lookup

Since DNS methods maps the website to some dummy address, whenever you ping the website, it in return pings the IP that has been mapped to it. Open Command Prompt and type  “ping“  followed by the website name. This will show the IP that been associated with it. Comparing it to the original IP you can find if the site has been blocked by DNS or not.

Open a Blocked website

If you cannot get a chance to edit the IP mapping table, you can still open the blocked website using proxy websites. HideMyAss is one such proxy website viewer, that can help you in this case.

HideMyAss