# Turning a VPN into a proxy

## haarp

Hey,

Even after searching for a while, I couldn't find anything useful, but I refuse to believe that it doesn't exist.

I'm looking for a way to connect to a VPN (L2TP or OpenVPN), and turn that into a (socks) proxy. So every application connecting to that proxy would get routed through the VPN, but the rest of the system would not be forced through it.

Does anyone know how to do that? Surely there must be something that facilitates this. Or do I seriously have to set up a virtual machine, connect the entire machine to the VPN and then set up a proxy in there instead?

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## Hu

You may be able to do this with policy-based routing, by running the SOCKS proxy locally and setting a policy that traffic from the proxy has a default route through the VPN.

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## haarp

 *Hu wrote:*   

> You may be able to do this with policy-based routing, by running the SOCKS proxy locally and setting a policy that traffic from the proxy has a default route through the VPN.

 

Phew, I think that's a bit beyond me. Routing is not my strong point...

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## eccerr0r

I'm not sure why something like using an ssh tunnel to a local socks proxy on that server wouldn't work similarly?

I ended up just tunneling all my traffic to my openvpn.  That way if I'm on an insecure wifi access point, I'd have encryption when browsing at that site...

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## haarp

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> I'm not sure why something like using an ssh tunnel to a local socks proxy on that server wouldn't work similarly?
> 
> I ended up just tunneling all my traffic to my openvpn.  That way if I'm on an insecure wifi access point, I'd have encryption when browsing at that site...

 

My VPN service only offers VPNs, no shell access. So that's not an option :/

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