I have a friend in Russia who loves watching animal videos and those silly video essays on YouTube and now YouTube is blocked in Russia. I have a spare netbook with Linux Mint and I've been trying to set up an OpenVPN server for her using this guide and I've tried a cracked version of OpenVPN Access Server, but I guess this whole thing is above my pay grade – the client on my phone still won't connect.
What the easiest solution to this situation? Should pull the trigger and install Debian because all those easy setup guides are targeted to Debian? Is there is easier alternative to OpenVPN with an android client?
Maybe a SOCKS proxy is good enough?
SSH can act as a SOCKS proxy and that's pretty easy to do. Your friend just needs to be able to login onto your computer with an ssh account and run this ssh command on her computer:
And then set proxy settings in the browser or whatever to SOCKS4/5, localhost, port 1234.