Selfhosting a proxy at home?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 26 points – 1 years ago

Hello! I have a server that runs 24/7, and have recently started doing some stuff that requires scraping the web. The websites are detecting the server’s IP to not be residential though, and it’s causing issues.

I’d like to host a proxy server on the small server I have running 24/7 in my house, so that everything for that 1 page could be proxied through it. Does anyone have any idea how I’d set up a server like that? Thanks.

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Max-P already provided good options, but I have to ask what I, and probably other people, wonder : why don't you just run that scrapping program from your home server, then?

The scraping program saves large files which I don’t have space for on the tiny raspi

(sorry for the double post, the instance I'm on was throwing errors)

Gotcha, thanks for satisfying my curiosity. :) Of course, you can plug a usb drive on the Pi, but you know better what your needs are. Good luck!

I’m honestly planning to stop using the Pi today, it’s been unstable and I don’t like Raspbian, but I decided it’s not worth it to reinstall after getting 3 corrupted SD cards and just bought a used thin client which will replace it.

I feel you, been there. :) I now use Gentoo on my Pi and it is stable, but I can't recommend that to anyone who is not already used to Gentoo, it's challenging to install it by itself.

Regarding the SD card, I have no problem anymore since I stopped using the cheapest brands. I now use only Sandisk Ultra microSDXC, and the oldest ones have been working for four years without issue. It's still basically a NAND (same stuff than in SSD drives) soldered on pins, though, so it's very fragile. Care should be taken to neve bend them : they look flexible, but the NAND really isn't.

It's also a good idea to backup the whole card. As they usually weight way less than hard drives, it's easy to backup on your system and flash them back, mounting the sdcard on your desktop/laptop:

lsblk # find the device name, let's say it's mmcblk1 
dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=./backup-file bs=1G  # making a backup
dd if=./backup-file of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1G  # restoring the backup

if means "input file", of means "output file" and bs is the buffer size (how many bytes are copied at once, the more the faster, but it will use that amount or RAM at each iteration). dd is just copying input to output, bs bytes by bs bytes.

If you do that regularly, even using cheap sdcard that fail after a year will be less of a setback : you can just flash the last saved version of the system on a new card. It's probably better, though, to keep only the OS on the sdcard, and store important daily updated data on a usb drive or key.

I have a better solution for the problem now. NixOS

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