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             Getting The Most From Proxy Hunter and Plookup:

       Finding And Maintaining Your Own Proxy Collection - by Hotspur 



Find Proxy Hunter, and Plookup, at http://www.lightspeed.de/irc4all/files.htm



Sites like Cavency, IRC4all, and Proxys4all are good places to look for proxies, but they get so
many visitors that the proxies often die within days of being posted. Wouldn't it be nice if
there was a quick way of testing whole lists of them in batches and weeding out the dead ones
without laboriously loading them individually in an application and seeing if they work? Well,
there is.



Proxy Hunter for Windows is one of the easiest programs to use in scanning for proxies on your
own, but it also lets you test batches of them quickly to maintain your lists. If you've never
used it, you really have to start. (If i can handle it, anyone can, hehehe.)



Let's begin with the basics, scanning for proxies:



First off, you'll find that you have to enter an IP range to scan with Proxy Hunter. To get a
hint of where to start searching, go to the Web sites that post proxies and look for a cluster
of consecutive IPs. This will likely be a fruitful range. For example, suppose you see a list
with a whole heap of proxies, containing a small cluster like:



194.186.43.231

194.186.105.97

194.186.145.100

194.186.180.210



Pay dirt: There are probably (but not necessarily) a heap of working proxies within that range.
So enter the minimum for your low address, which in this case would be:



194.186.1.1



and the maximum for your upper address, which in this case would be:



194.186.255.255



Now you have to enter a port to check. This will be either 3128, 8080 or 80 for http proxies,
or 1080 for socks. Take your cue from the numbers you started with. If they were all 80, scan
on 80. Click on "Start", and let the hunter do its job.



Now your status field is going to start flooding with junk: addresses
with "not proxy", "not free", "time out", etc., appended to them. Don't let that bother you.
When the run is complete, click on "Del Waste". All the junk proxies will be deleted, leaving
you with a list of good ones. Voila! Save them to a .txt file and keep going. (Now when you
auto-save the results with poxy hunter, it wants to save as a file, so don't overwrite a file
with working proxies already in it!) It's easier to
select the good ones with shift/click and then copy and paste them to a master .txt file.
You can mix http 3128, http 80, http 8080, and socks 1080 together in the master file.



The only exception here is that with socks servers, those that Proxy Hunter returns
as "not free" often work, so you may want to check some of them manually. A new version
(3.0) is out, though i have not tested it yet to see if it is more reliable in that regard.





Maintaining your master file:



Proxies die like dogs. One you find today may die tomorrow, so you should verify those in
your master file regularly. Proxy Hunter will import a .txt file full of proxies and verify
all of them for you very quickly. They can be a combination of all types. Just keep them in
the format,



123.321.111.222:8080



Remember to use the colon to separate the port from the addy, and it works nicely.
Click on "Load", and import your entire master file. Now click on "Verify All". The hunter will
connect to each IP, and report the results. You will notice that several of your proxies no
longer work. Now just click on "Del Waste", and voila, the dead ones disappear. Now you can
auto save, this time overwriting your master file, because you don't want to keep the dead ones.
Do this once a week or so, depending on how often you like to change proxies.



Verifying proxies you find on the Web:



When you find a long list of proxies posted at a Web site, the easiest thing to do is copy and
paste the whole list to a .txt file, then import that file to Proxy Hunter, and then verify and
dump the waste just as i described above. It will save you a lot of time. Often you will find
domains listed instead of the IPs, but for Proxy Hunter you need to scan an IP range. No
worries, just use Plookup to convert domain lists to IP lists and vice versa.



Testing your proxies:



Verifying a proxy is not the same as testing it. You should run an env check
through "Proxy Judge" or the services at Cavency (which offers more detailed results) before
you use one. You want to test for both speed and anonymity. Get rid of the slow ones, and the
ones that forward your IP. Using Proxy Hunter and Plookup as i've just described will lessen the
burden in testing by chucking the dead ones before you start.



And don't forget, test your "good" proxies every time you use them; one that's anonymous today
may advertise your IP tomorrow.


Happy hunting :)                                                     -=Hots=-

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