Slow Servers' Gemlog: IPv4 SOCKS Proxy

Posted: 2026-01-20

In working to fully host SporeStack (internal infrastructure) on Slow Servers I found that there's three APIs that SporeStack needs which have no IPv6 access. While the best option is for those upstream APIs to add IPv6 access, I realized having some outbound IPv4 access may be useful.

To accomodate this, Freya is now running dante, a SOCKS proxy, which listens on 2602:f5ef::1080, port 1080, and sends traffic out through 142.249.45.12. This proxy only works for IPv4 as it's intended to be used for stopgap cases where you much reach a IPv4 service, and using Tor is undesirable for one reason or another.

This works for any VPS hosted under Slow Servers, so any IP within 2602:f5ef::/48.

It is set to log requests because if there's any abuse through the proxy, I need to be able to find what which VPS sent it. I plan on configuring some kind of limited data retention on those logs.

And hopefully few of you will need this service, but for some it's probably quite handy.

Example, from this VPS ( slowservers.net itself is hosted on our smallest VPS plan):

slowservers# curl -vx 'socks5h://[2602:f5ef::1080]:1080' http://canhazip.com

  Trying [2602:f5ef::1080]:1080...
Opened SOCKS connection from 2602:f5ef:0:102::2 port 20274 to canhazip.com port 80 (via 2602:f5ef::1080 port 1080)
Established connection to 2602:f5ef::1080 (2602:f5ef::1080 port 1080) from 2602:f5ef:0:102::2 port 20274
using HTTP/1.x


GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: canhazip.com
User-Agent: curl/8.16.0
Accept: */*


Request completely sent off

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:17:54 GMT
< Content-Type: text/plain
< Content-Length: 14
< Connection: keep-alive
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Vary: accept-encoding
< Server: cloudflare
< CF-RAY: 9c11420cfe6b7b4d-SEA
< alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
<
142.249.45.12

Connection #0 to host 2602:f5ef::1080:80 left intact

Of course, it also supports HTTPS.

IPv6 does not work, because you already have IPv6 if you have a VPS on Slow Servers.

slowservers# curl -x 'socks5h://[2602:f5ef::1080]:1080' http://ipv6.canhazip.com
curl: (97) cannot complete SOCKS5 connection to ipv6.canhazip.com. (4)

It also refuses to proxy for localhost and anything in our IPv4 block, 142.249.45.8/29.

slowservers# curl -x 'socks5h://[2602:f5ef::1080]:1080' http://127.0.0.1
curl: (97) cannot complete SOCKS5 connection to 127.0.0.1. (2)
slowservers# curl -x 'socks5h://[2602:f5ef::1080]:1080' https://slowservers.net
curl: (97) cannot complete SOCKS5 connection to slowservers.net. (2)

Freya also runs SNIProxy on 142.249.45.11, but there's probably no sane/non-nefarious reason to proxy to it in this manner, so it's blocked.