Installation and Configuration of SOCKS Proxy Danted on Redhat/CentOS/AWS EC2 from Source Code

The goal of this tutorial is to describe the installation and configuration of the SOCKS5 Proxy Dante on a CentOS, Redhat, AWS EC2 or similar Linux distribution using the yum package manager to end up with a working SOCKS5 proxy.

For Debian and Ubuntu please follow these instructions.

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Log into your server, access root privileges and run a system update:

sudo -i
yum update -y

Step 1 — Installation

The dante-server package is not available in the Amazon Linux package repository by default. Instead, build it from source following these steps.

Install the build tools and dependencies:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install libevent-devel

Download the Dante source code:

curl -O https://www.inet.no/dante/files/dante-1.4.2.tar.gz

Extract the source code:

tar xvzf dante-1.4.2.tar.gz
cd dante-1.4.2

Configure and compile dante-server:

./configure
make
make install

Verify the installation:

sockd -v

Step 2 — Configuration

Copy the sockd.conf file to the appropriate location:

cp /home/ec2-user/dante-1.4.2/example/sockd.conf /etc/sockd.conf

To find the IP address of the eth0 interface run:

ip add show eth0

Example output:

2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 9001 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 06:72:6b:5d:09:dd brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 172.1.2.3/20 brd 172.1.2.255 scope global dynamic eth0
    valid_lft 3451sec preferred_lft 3451sec
    inet6 fe80::472:6bff:fe5d:9dd/64 scope link
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Replace 172.1.2.3 with your server IP and 1.2.3.4 with your client IP from where you want to connect.

Edit the config file:

vi /etc/sockd.conf

internal: 0.0.0.0 port = 1080
external: 172.1.2.3
logoutput: stderr
logoutput: /var/log/danted.log
clientmethod: none
socksmethod: none
user.privileged: root
user.notprivileged: nobody

client pass {
    from: 1.2.3.4/32 to: 0.0.0.0/0
    log: error connect disconnect
}
client block {
    from: 1.2.3.4/32 to: 0.0.0.0/0
    log: connect error
}
socks pass {
    from: 1.2.3.4/32 to: 0.0.0.0/0
    log: error connect disconnect
}
socks block {
    from: 1.2.3.4/32 to: 0.0.0.0/0
    log: connect error
}

The system service file is not included, so create one:

vi /etc/systemd/system/sockd.service

[Unit]
Description=SOCKS5 Proxy Server
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/sockd -D
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload the system configuration and start the SOCKS5 proxy:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start sockd.service
systemctl enable sockd.service

Check the status to confirm it's running:

systemctl status sockd

If everything worked, you now have a working SOCKS5 proxy server that only accepts connections from IP 1.2.3.4 and forwards to any destination address.

Additionally you can enable proper authentication — more info can be found here.

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