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.
How much are you scraping? You may end up getting your home up blocked.
Nah, it’s not much. Maybe 10 pages a day.
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 backupifmeans “input file”,ofmeans “output file” andbsis 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).ddis just copying input to output,bsbytes bybsbytes.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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Besides other answers - you could just use SSH port forwarding. Remote would be your home server, local would be your “cloud” server. You should initiate the connection from the cloud server to your home server. Playing with local ports would enable you filter what domains are used for the proxy.
I rarely use it, so the exact syntax is gone from my memory. It is a bit tricky at first, but definitely not rocket science to figure out.
Once the connection is established - you would point your scraper to
https://localhost:localportThis is the most simple solution and probably a lot safer than the alternatives. Another good option would be to use OpenVPN.
I ended up hosting the scraper service on my home server and exposing it through Cloudflare Tunnels, as the service is pretty much just an API that doesn’t really do much data downloads
You can pretty easily install Squid, it’s fairly simple to configure and works well for most use cases. Just a plain simple HTTP proxy.
You could also set up a VPN to your home to achieve something similar, by binding some requests to the VPN IP. It’s a bit harder to set up however as it involves routing tables, route metrics and conditionally binding the outgoing connection to a specific interface
