LocalProxy - troubleshooting


> and while surfing the site htt://www.arabtimes.com the block site screen appear..Why?

Did the blocked page appear and then refresh? That's spooky, but normal.
LocalProxy does that when it sees that it's made a mistake trusting a proxy. It then demotes that proxy so it doesn't get used as much in future.

That function depends on getting a 403 (forbidden) error from the proxy, a recognized 'access denied' page, or (in the UAE) a recognized redirection to the Emirates block page URL. If it's not refreshing, it may be that a 403 is not returned, or noone has sent me the HTML code for the local 'access denied' page. I can't make LP recognize it and do something about it if it doesn't know what it looks like; in fact, it can look like a fast page

***
If people send me the URL(s) and copy(s) of their blocked page(s) I can add a check for redirection there in a similar manner as the UAE, or a match to some string on the page as necessary.
***

To explain that a bit:
If there's no 403, or something localProxy can recognize as censoring, it just treats those 'access denied' responses as normal (probably nice and fast!) pages.

In the UAE, a redirection to the 'access denied' web page usually occurs. Then your browser gets that page and displays it. At that time, it's pointless for localProxy to refresh it using some other proxy because the browser will just get the 'access denied' URL again. So the refresh is inserted into the redirection page as it is returned from the censoring proxy. That way, the browser will repeat the request for the URL which was blocked, rather than the 'access denied' page. To do this, the redirection page itself must be recognized by localProxy.

> and many picture not appear.

Do they appear if you refresh manually a few times? Click the 'go' button a couple of times to see if it works that way (that way doesn't refetch anything already displayed properly). Reload if necessary. Remember that localProxy still needs to try the proxies it is using before it knows they can be trusted. That situation is better now that hosts.xml tells localProxy a lot of the properties it needed to find out for itself before, but it's still basically the way localProxy must work to be able to handle dynamic changes in those properties. It also *must* (since I have insisted it do this :-) use all the proxies at least once.

If it doesn't get better, then (maybe) either there's no 403, or there's no recognized 'censoring string' in the returned page. I've tried to catch all the ones I've seen in the UAE and other places as well as ones from censoring proxies on the Internet in general. But these things can be made/changed by any web admin, so I can believe that there are others out there.

If that doesn't fix it, then I would guess you have the config wrong. You can use the GUI 'show running config' to see what proxies it's using for the web browsing (http proxy service on 10080). If they are wrong, strange, blocked ports, etc. there is a problem with the config (probably your firewall spec.). If you have made your own config file, you *must* have a line like this:

    <item key="useFirewall">UAE-dialup</item>
to specify the firewall localProxy should use for you. See the 'global' section in the config-example.txt file, or the implementation in config-wayne.xml.

> I get 'out of memory' errors
If you see messages from MS Windows, indicating you are low on virtual
memory while running, you will need to increase the size of the swap file. If that fails, you will need to buy more RAM!
LP needs quite a lot of memory to hold all the proxy capabilities and statistics.

> I'm running it for the first time and the command window which is supposed to autoload the modules just disappears, What's up?
This window uses PPM to install any missing Perl modules. There was a bug in versions before about June, 2002 which could have caused this.
You can always go to a command window and type:
perl -w localProxy.pl
to see any error messages.
ppm verify
will tell you which modules you already have. The modInstall.bat file in the localProxy/proxyTools directory will have a list of the commands needed to install the required modules; look at that too. Run it, to see if it works.