Engineering notes, deep dives, implementation stories, and practical articles on Windows networking, packet filtering, proxies, VPNs, and related systems work.
Some technologies arrive with a bang, spend a few years at the peak of popularity, and then gradually disappear as something newer takes their place. SOCKS5 is different. It appeared in 1996, when HTTPS was still far from widespread, containers belonged to the future, and cloud services sounded more like science fiction than infrastructure. Since […]
When you find yourself abroad, whether on vacation, a business trip, or after relocating, you may suddenly discover that your usual Netflix library has “shrunk.” Some series and movies disappear, others appear, and certain premieres are released only in the US or the UK. The reason is regional licensing: Netflix catalogs differ from country to […]
In this post we’ll walk through a stripped-down Dante SOCKS5 setup designed specifically for running WireGuard WARP traffic through a proxy. The idea is simple: we don’t need a full SOCKS proxy that handles every possible connection, just a lean, safe configuration that lets WARP send its UDP packets while blocking everything else. This keeps […]
In recent months, I’ve continued to encounter cases where traditional VPN connections are becoming less reliable or outright blocked. For users who rely on remote access to home infrastructure or private networks, especially from regions with increasing traffic inspection or censorship, this creates a tangible threat to continuity. My own setup, a home server behind […]
In 2021, the popularity of the WireGuard VPN protocol in Egypt was significant enough that it was added to the block list, causing frustration for customers of commercial VPN providers such as Cloudflare Warp+ and Mullvad Wireguard, as well as some corporate VPN users. Initial research suggests that the block list is specifically targeting the […]
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a personal, cost-free SOCKS5 anonymous proxy with support for UDP ASSOCIATE (as specified in RFC1928) in Oracle Cloud. I documented these steps for myself while setting up the SOCKS5 proxy for the purpose of experimenting with forwarding WireGuard handshake packets over SOCKS5. However, I later decided to […]