Thursday, May 18, 2017

Using Artica Squid Open Source Project to Build Powerful and Safe but Simple to Use Proxy

5/18/2017 Software

Looking for a pre-installed GUI based Proxy for a while and found Artica recently. The feature is pretty attractive and GUI interface looks cool.

What is Artica?
"Artica Proxy is an appliance that claim to manage Squid-cache proxy with all features that Squid Cache provides.With the Artica Web interface you can monitor, manage get statistics of your proxy service.
Artica Proxy provides ISOs in order to build a full proxy appliance without any technical skills.
Artica Proxy allows to enable Web filtering engine with more than 30.000.000 categorized websites.

Other features included such as reverse-proxy, RDP proxy, VPN, DHCP, DNS..."
Here are some my experience on it.

1. Download Link:
http://artica-proxy.com/telechargements/

There are ISO, ESXi, Hyperv, Xen versions to download.

2. Installation in Vmware Workstation
In this post I am using Vmware Workstation 10 to do installation based on Artica Proxy CD-ROM ISO. The vm's configuration is set as following:

Hard Drive = 20G
CPU = Dual CPU with 2 Core
Memory = 3G
Delete other unused hardware such as printer, usb and sound card.

Full installation will take 15- 20 minutes depends on your host performance. Basic configuration wizard will take you 5 minutes to get a full functional Proxy for your internal machines.

2.1 Update to latest release

Current IOS version is 3.03.041314. It can be upgraded to 3.06.050915 by some clicks.

3. Test Proxy

Config client IE proxy with 192.168.236.100 on port 3128.

By default, Artica proxy will allow all internal machines to use proxy to surf internet. You wont need to do too much work to get all your clients to use this new proxy.

4. Artica Support

Artica Support is amazing. I have been tried to open tickets in their tracker system, in next a couple of hours they posted videos to answer my dummy questions. Artica also has a forum to let users discuss there.

5. Configuration Examples

Example 1: Using ACLs
1.1 Default block everything from Internal to Internet
1.2 Create a specific rule to allow one machine 192.168.5.53 to access some specific sites based on IP addresses or URL Domain names

Example 2: Using Web-Filtering
2.1 Default block everything from Internal to Internet
2.2 Create a specific rule to allow one machine 192.168.1.136 to access to categories News and Search Engines only