Make use of two different internet connections on a single Windows 7 machine.

16Apr10

My solution involves the installation of a proxy server (Squid/Linux) running virtually on VMWare. I tried this on a Windows 7 Home Premium machine and used the Ubuntu 8.04 JEOS (82.69mb and you can find it here) virtual appliance and the VMWare Workstation to run it. You can probably do it with Sun VirtualBox but I haven’t tried it.

Extract the zip the open the virtual appliance on VMWare Workstation. The default settings are fine but you will need to go to Edit\Virtual Network Editor menu option and bridge the network card you are planning to use for Squid.

In this example I am using a WiFi network card for my 2nd internet connection.

Virtual Network Editor Settings

Now you can run the virtual appliance and everything should be working fine. Do an ifconfig and ping something to make sure you have internet access.

Testing the connection

The default port for squid is 3128 so fire up your browser (firefox in this example) and set the proxy settings. In this example the IP address of the proxy server is 192.168.2.8 (as shown in ifconfig)

Firefox Settings

As you can see in the following screenshot I can upload my HD video on youtube using my main internet connection (which takes all my bandwidth) and use the other one for everything else.

Testing the Proxy

You can also edit /etc/squid/squid.conf and make any changes you want (DNS Servers, Authentication etc).  By default in this distribution ad-blocking is enabled. If you experience any problems with some websites you can edit the /etc/squid/adsblock.txt file.

Another cool idea is to install webmin to manage your proxy easier instead of editing the .conf file.

apt-get install wget
cd /home/user
mkdir webmin
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.490_all.deb
apt-get install perl
dpkg -i webmin_1.490_all.deb
apt-get -f install

Then you will be able to log into webmin using https://<server_ip&gt;:10000

I know this isn’t a step-by-step guide so if you face any problems or if you think that I forgot something just let me know.

PS. The root password is “vmroot”. You should change that after your first log-in.

Filed under: Networking   |  5 Comments
Tags: linux, Networking, Proxy Server, Squid, VMWare