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buzzki
Asked: 2010-08-16 00:35:57 +0800 CST

How can I tell if there's a transparent HTTP proxy on my broadband?

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I'm trying to work out if my broadband provider is using a transparent proxy. Mostly I don't mind if they do, but today I'm trying to preview a site I have moved from one server to another, before DNS has propagated. So I put the new IP address into /etc/hosts and expect to be able to connect to the new server, but alas I'm still getting the old one.

To prove that I'm talking to the "new" server, I'm telnetting into the new IP address and doing this:

GET /
Host: www.example.com

And this is still hitting the old server.

I tried the same operation from another host elsewhere on the internet that definitely doesn't have a transparent proxy cache on it, and this time it hit the correct server.

So I'm fairly sure that there's a cache on my broadband line... and the cache is doing its own DNS lookup which of course overrides my /etc/hosts file.

However, is there any way that I can find out more about it, and confirm that it's there?

  • the "source IP address" of my web requests seems to be my home IP address, so that doesn't show up a proxy cache

  • I'm not having any success with Wireshark examining the packets to see if there's any difference when communicating direct with a site (e.g. on localhost) vs. communicating via the proxy.

Can anyone offer any words of wisdom? Is there any sure-fire way of detecting or identifying an inline/transparent proxy cache?

Thanks

transparent-proxy

4 Answers

  1. I did a quick search and stumbled across this:

    http://www.lagado.com/proxy-test

    Maybe give that a shot?

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  2. Best Answer

    If you're using an IP address to connect to the remote server, then the contents of your /etc/hosts and/or DNS records don't matter.

    You could try running nmap against the IP address in question from your local machine and a remote machine and see what it identifies as the remote TCP/IP stack in use, and see if it matches (or doesn't match) what you'd expect given what you know about the server's OS.

    You could try using SSL, or an arbitrary non-standard port, if you want to try to avoid the proxy.

    You could probably learn something by looking at the time it takes your machine to connect to port 80 on a remote machine, or many remote machines. If your ISP is running a local transparent proxy, then the time it takes to open a connection should be pretty similar whether you're trying to connect to a machine that's close or far away, because in either case you're actually connecting to a nearby machine. httperf might be helpful in this regard.

    You might also learn something by shutting down the remote server, and then trying to connect via the proxy - if you can successfully connect to a machine that's not accepting connections, that's not a good sign.

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  3. Try the "what is my ip" services; most will report the proxy's ip

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  4. This article has a perl script and techniques to detect the presence of a transparent proxy

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