We all know that a proxy server is a network of computers through which we can access the internet by hiding our own online identity. The proxy server is located somewhere else in the world and when we connect to the proxy server, it is as if we are connecting to the internet from that location. This way we can also bypass geo-location based bans on certain websites.
Typically a proxy server is basically the IP address of the proxy server and it port to which we can connect to. We have to manually configure our computers to connect to a proxy server. A VPN server is not much different. The main difference between a proxy server and a VPN server is that proxy can be used only with a few applications while VPN covers the entire device’s internet traffic.
In order to quickly configure a SOCKS5 proxy server or a VPN server on your Windows PC, we can use an open-source software. It has the same name as that of a popular bath soap – Lux. After installing this software on Windows, we can launch it and start adding all the proxy servers and VPN servers to its list. It supports only SOCKS5 and Shadowsocks based servers.
If you do not have any server to add, then you can simply search for publicly available “free SOCKS5 proxy servers”. You will find hundreds of free proxy servers, however there is no guarantee that they will work.
In the Lux user interface, we can select an added proxy server and then click on the toggle button to set it as the default proxy server. We can also check the connection speeds (ping returns) of all the added proxy servers in the list. When the connection is timed out, it shows a red dot on that server.
All things considered, Lux is a pretty handy proxy/VPN server client application. However, it needs good quality VPN or proxy servers in order to work. It would have been amazing if the author added a bunch of working free or public servers for testing purposes.
You can download Lux VPN and Proxy client for Windows from https://github.com/igoogolx/lux.