how to install and run a mocks socks5 proxy on Linux/Debian

Setting up a Socks5 proxy is easy as pie with mocks, the effort is similar or even less than with tinyproxy (a super lightweight HTTP proxy).

However MOCKS does not seem to support authentication, hence you should make sure to change the port to something random non-standard (not 3128 10080 1080 8888 but maybe 16234).

Here is how I run it on Linux Debian 6 (Squeeze) minimal x86:

At first you can update your system and install the text editor nano, which you will need to change the configuration file:

apt-get upgrade
apt-get update
apt-get install nano

Then download mocks:

wget http://www.sourcefiles.org/System/Servers/mocks-0.0.2.tar.gz

Should this mirror not be available anymore you can go to one of the following sites and copy the direct link of the file to download it:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Proxy/MOCKS-19027.shtml

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mocks/

Unpack it:

tar -xzvf mocks-0.0.2.tar.gz

Change to the folder:

cd mocks-0.0.2

start/stop mocks with the commands:

./mocks start
./mocks shutdown

Done! Now that was really easy. Set the proxy in your browser, the port is 10080, the type is SOCKS5.

Let’s take a quick look at the config file:

nano mocks.conf

Here you can change the port … and that is about everything you can change. Okay you can also deny access to certain IP-ranges and let mocks tunnel through another proxy, but you are probably not going to do that.

Note that you have to restart mocks for changes to take effect.

The files “mocks.log” and “mocks.pid” represent the logfile and the session file which will be created once mocks is launched.
If you do not feel like creating logfiles you can set it to /dev/null or another creative way that people on the internet seem to be using is to set the access rights of the logfile to 0:

chmod 000 mocks.log

Last but not least, the proxy has no authentication so anyone can use it. If you have a static IP address you can set access rules in the config file, also if your IP address is dynamic but always in the same range you can allow access to just that specific range.