We deploy Wi-Fi HotSpot using Captive Portal technology. Deploying Wi-Fi HotSpot using Captive Portal technology Intrusive portal php

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When organizing guest Internet connections in conference rooms, public libraries and cafes, special attention should be paid to ensuring security and authentication as simple as possible. A technology called Captive Portal is designed to help with this.

WARNING

Access point administrators typically resolve all DNS queries from the internal network to the external network. This can be used for unauthorized access to the Internet using DNS tunneling technology, implemented in solutions such as Dnscat, Ozyman, NameServer Transfer Protocol (NSTX), Dns2tcp, and others.

How Captive Portal works

All users who want to connect to a public Wi-Fi network and access the Internet first go through a gateway, which is a computer with several network interfaces. The gateway acts as a router and firewall, and also contains a web server to allow user authentication using a browser. An internal database or an external RADIUS server can be used to authenticate clients. All packets from “unauthorized” users are marked on the firewall, and the visitor is redirected to a special web page (Captive Portal), where he can review the connection conditions and enter a login/password (or access code). After the user is authenticated, the computer on which he is working is identified, and its MAC and IP addresses are added to the firewall’s white list. In the simplest case, the user may not undergo authentication at all; Captive Portal automatically receives the computer’s IP and MAC addresses, which are immediately substituted in the firewall rules. Subsequently, all packets pass through the router without restrictions. Additionally, depending on the role, restrictions may be set on speed, time, traffic or resources visited.

There are currently several projects that allow you to quickly deploy a Captive Portal: Wifidog, PacketFence, ChilliSpot and EasyHotspot web interface, KATTIVE, PepperSpot and jkaptive. The choice of a specific solution depends on the required functions and supported operating systems. For example, ChilliSpot officially supports several Linux distributions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OpenWRT. By the way, this is the only application whose package is available in the official Ubuntu repository, and installing it is simple:

$ sudo apt-get install chillispot

To organize a simple portal without support for external authentication tools, a solution like jkaptive will be enough, but to understand all the capabilities included in PacketFence will take some time. Some of the presented projects have already ceased their development, but all the developments are still relevant. You can also find modules for various languages that allow you to create a Captive Portal yourself using available tools. For example, for Perl it is called Captive::Portal, there is a module for Python/Django tollgate.org.au.

In addition, a number of router distributions offer the ability to quickly create a Captive Portal with just a couple of mouse clicks: Untangle, pfSense, Zeroshell, m0n0wall, ClearOS and Zentyal. But if desired, or if it is impossible to change the current network configuration, it is easy to create the necessary scripts yourself. This is what we will do.

Setting up Captive Portal on Linux

Once you understand how Captive Portal works, it’s easy to implement it using standard Linux tools. Moreover, several methods are available - marking and blocking packets coming from unauthorized users, using a chain of rules or shamanism with NAT. Additionally, you can reconfigure the rules of the Squid proxy server or the DansGuardian content filter on the fly, which will allow you to control Internet access at the level of user groups, and simply cache and filter information, blocking access to unwanted resources. And by the way, this is exactly the approach used in specialized distributions.

As an example, let’s look at the option of using a separate chain and DansGuardian. First of all, we create packet filter rules:

# Clear the rules ebtables -t broute -F ebtables -F # Forward packets going to port 80 to the iptables stack ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -p IPV4 --ip-protocol 6 --ip-destination-port 80 - j redirect --redirect-target ACCEPT

Don't forget to allow specific low-level protocols:

Ebtables -A INPUT -p ARP -j ACCEPT ebtables -A FORWARD -p ARP -j ACCEPT ebtables -A OUTPUT -p ARP -j ACCEPT

We write the same for LENGTH and IPv4. Now we create rules for iptables:

Iptables -N captive iptables -F captive iptables -P FORWARD DROP # Forward packets going to port 80 to 8080, where DansGuardian is running iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i br0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT -- to-ports 8080 iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080 iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080 # Create a chain for the LAN iptables -A FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -j captive iptables -A FORWARD -d 192.168.1.0/24 -j captive # Allow local traffic (add all necessary networks) iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 192.168.1.0/24 -j ACCEPT iptables -I FORWARD -p udp -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 192.168.1.0/24 -j ACCEPT iptables -A captive -j RETURN

Don't forget to allow ICMP, DNS, DHCP and other necessary protocols. By the way, there is one important point here: many admins don’t bother and allow all DNS traffic. Some users use this to gain access to the Network using DNS tunneling technology. Of course, the final speed is small, but quite sufficient to use ICQ, write on Twitter or issue commands via SSH. And most importantly, the IP of your network will appear everywhere, and there will be no records of unauthorized activity in the logs, because not every administrator writes all requests to the DNS server log. Therefore, it is better to strictly specify the allowed servers.

Setting up Captive Portal in Zentyal

If a new server is allocated for Captive Portal and all settings need to be made in a short time, then it is better to turn to specialized solutions, where everything necessary is done in literally a couple of keystrokes. A striking example is the server distribution Zentyal, aimed at small and medium-sized corporate networks. It can act in any of the four roles of network gateway, Office Server, communications server and infrastructure. To support Captive Portal, you must activate the module of the same name during installation (the Gateway role and all related packages are activated). Then in the initial setup wizard we correctly point to the LAN interface. We create user accounts and groups. Next, in the Zentyal configuration interface, go to the Captive Portal menu and select the desired one in the “Captive interfaces” field, select the group whose members will have access, and indicate the port to which users will be redirected. That's all. Now anyone who wants to connect to the network enters their credentials, if the authentication is successful, a pop-up window appears that needs to be kept open. To disconnect, just click the “Logout” button or simply close the browser window.

If we have a gateway built on Ubuntu, then it is easier to use a special repository to install Zentyal-related applications:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zentyal/3.0 $ sudo apt-get update

After which the command sudo apt-cache search zentyal will show more than 20 Zentyal modules.

Iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 8.8.8.8/32 -j ACCEPT iptables -I FORWARD -p udp -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 8.8.8.8/32 -j ACCEPT

Basically, there is nothing special at this moment. The essence of Captive Portal is to add the necessary rules on the fly. To do this, you will need a script that will receive IP/MAC and pass them to the packet filter. There is no point in presenting the entire HTML page here, so we will limit ourselves to the key points with the necessary functionality. The page where the user is redirected should have the following code that gets the IP and MAC addresses:

If necessary, we add a field to verify the login and password; the necessary examples are easy to find on the Internet. Next, in the same script, we substitute the received data into the iptables and DansGuardian rules, and then restart the latter:

Exec("sudo /sbin/iptables-bin -I captive -s ($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]) -j captive"); exec("sudo /sbin/iptables-bin -I captive -d ($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]) -j captive"); exec("touch /etc/dansguardian/lists/authplugins/ipgroups"); exec("echo \"($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]) = filter1\" >> /etc/dansguardian/lists/authplugins/ipgroups"); exec("sudo /sbin/service dansguardian reload");

After connecting the client, the entry in /etc/dansguardian/lists/authplugins/ipgroups will look like this:

192.168.1.100 = filter1

The filter1 parameter points to a group of filters so we can set specific settings for all users connecting through the Captive Portal. If necessary, the user login can also be easily entered into DansGuardian to implement individual rules. Don't forget to enable the IP filter in dansguardian.conf:

$ sudo nano /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf authplugin = "/etc/dansguardian/authplugins/ip.conf"

Since the system commands used can only be executed by root, let’s tweak sudoers a little so that the web server can also run them:

$ sudo nano /etc/sudoers ... www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/iptables-bin www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/service www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/arping

So we have implemented the simplest Captive Portal. If the hotspot will work for days, you should make sure that the table is cleared after a while. Here you can come up with several options. For example, create a cron job in parallel, which will be triggered after a certain time, removing the rule. Another option is to record session data in a separate file, and then, using cron or each call to a PHP script, analyze the file creation time and delete outdated entries. In Zentyal, for example, after registering a user, a separate window opens, and a file is created in the /var/lib/zentyal-captiveportal/sessions directory containing all session data (IP and MAC address). Once the user closes the Popup, all information and rules are cleared.

Setting up Captive Portal on FreeBSD

Understanding how a packet filter works and having development skills in a language used in the web, it is easy to organize a Captive Portal on any OS. And *BSD is no exception here, and the implementation using IPFW looks even simpler. The principle remains the same as before. We block all packets from unauthorized users and redirect them to a web page. After the guest confirms the information, we allow access to the Internet. For convenience, we will save all information about authorized IPs into a database (in the example, a text file). We put the necessary variables in a system file like /etc/rc.local (or better yet, in a separate one to make it easier to search):

# File with a database of allowed IPs $db = "/tmp/session.db"; # Apache IP address and port $gateway = "192.168.0.100.8080"; # Wi-Fi subnet $wnet = "192.168.1.0/24"; # Wired LAN $pnet = "192.168.0.0/24"; # List of ports that need to be blocked and forwarded $fwdports = "80,21,23,25,110,443"; # Grouping firewall rules $setnum = "set 5"; # Starting number of rules for blocking and forwarding, it is advisable to make the number large so as not to interfere with current settings $fwdrulenum = "50000"; # Add a forwarding rule ipfw -q add $fwdrulenum $setnum fwd $gateway tcp from $wnet to any $fwdports # Deny access from Wi-Fi to the LAN (if necessary, of course) $denyrulenum = $fwdrulenum + 1; ipfw -q add $denyrulenum $setnum deny all from $wnet to $pnet

Add the following code to the web page. In the example, the user simply confirms certain conditions in the checkbox, the result is sent to the Perl script access.pl.

Configuration Wizard Antamedia HotSpot index.html

Perl is chosen here purely for variety; you can rework the PHP code shown above if you wish. The script itself:

Access.pl #!/usr/bin/perl require 5.004; use Fcntl qw(:DEFAULT); # To access the file, use the module (perldoc.perl.org/NDBM_File.html) use NDBM_File; # Get the user's IP $USERIP = $ENV(REMOTE_ADDR); # Database file $db = "/tmp/session.db"; # We put the IP data into a file and add a allowing rule tie %hash, "NDBM_File", $db, O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0644; $hash(userip) = $USERIP; $rulenum--; system("ipfw -q add $rulenum $setnum allow all from $ip to any"); untie %hash; print "Access granted\n";

If desired, we supplement the script by checking the MAC address and rebuilding the proxy server rules. By calling the time() function, we can also store the connection time (in seconds), which we can then use to reset old connections.

Access.pl $TSTAMP = time(); # Add tie to the call... $hash(time) = $TSTAMP; $hash(userip) = $USERIP; ... # Check that the session time has expired (examples are easy to find on the Internet), and remove the rule if (time has expired) ( system("ipfw -q delete $setnum"); unlink("$db"); exit(0 ); )

Captive Portal on Windows

Organizing Captive Portal on Windows using standard tools is problematic due to the peculiarities of the firewall (which, by the way, began to control outgoing connections only with Vista), so in any case you will have to turn to third-party solutions. The choice here is not particularly large - DNS Redirector, FirstSpot, PacketFence, myWIFIzone, runs under WinXP/2k), Wifidog and Antamedia HotSpot. Of these, PacketFence and Wifidog are free. The first requires some preparation, and the components used in the second, such as Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, are more convenient to deploy on a *nix system.

Of these, the most functional is Antamedia HotSpot, which allows you to organize free and prepaid access (by traffic, time or speed), manage bandwidth, guaranteeing the required speed to different clients, block unwanted sites, obtain statistics and much more. Deploying Antamedia HotSpot is not particularly difficult; in simple installation mode, all components (hotspot, operator interface and database) are installed on one computer. A wizard helps with the initial settings; interfaces are configured automatically; the user can also choose the appearance of the registration page. Further management is carried out using a clear interface.

Conclusion

Organizing an access point with various use cases is not that difficult. The choice of a specific solution depends on the availability of time for preparation and the desire to delve into the settings. All presented schemes can be easily developed to the required level.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Today I want to talk about free hosting options (from ) for a website, which you may need at the initial stage of getting to know webmastering, when you are not yet sure that you will continue to work on your website and spend money on maintaining it. Read the link about what you should pay attention to when choosing it, so that we don’t get distracted by it.

Since they practically require support for PHP (web programming language) and MySql (databases), this is exactly the kind of hosting that I would like to have at my complete disposal for free. In this publication, I will tell you about a whole galaxy of similar services, and you will choose one that is best suited to solve your current problems.

My first free hosting - what determined the choice

I myself, in principle, am not a greedy person, and at the initial stage of development of my blog I was able to pay a hundred rubles or even more per month for full-fledged hosting. But nevertheless, I didn’t do this, and for quite a long time I sat on the so-called “free hosting” (from oxnull.net, which, by the way, still works to this day) and there are several reasons for this.

Firstly, reading the reviews, I realized that cheap hosting can easily be very problematic and buggy, and its administration is inaccessible and not loyal to users. Free hosting can also easily suffer from this, but at least it’s clear why.
Secondly, like any novice user, I decided to make my first Internet project on a free engine (at first it was Joomla, and then I mastered WordPress) and it would be logical to place it in the free “stall”. This does not oblige you to anything, and if you suddenly get bored of fiddling with the site (or something else goes wrong), then you can calmly quit the whole thing without regretting the money spent.

As you probably know, hosting services can be divided into those that support the PHP programming language and MySQL databases, and those that do not. The latter are becoming less and less common, but you can still find them among the free ones.

If you have php and mysql we will be able to use hosting to create a website on it “running on an engine” (using a content management system - CMS). The most popular are Drupal, Bitrix, etc. If there is no support for php and mysql on free hosting, then our destiny is only ordinary HTML pages and nothing more (although this may well be suitable for a business card website).

However, the use of a CMS (engine) itself promises us considerable benefits when creating and maintaining more or less complex websites, blogs, and even more so forums. There are built-in editors “ala Word”, and a bunch of extensions to add new functionality, and you don’t need knowledge of Html, CSS (and even more so PHP). Just take it and create! In general, the best thing for a novice webmaster.

Seven years ago, having considered all the free offers available at that time for hosting my current blog, I settled on Oxnull.net. At the same time, I went to all the sites of free hosters and carefully studied the proposed conditions. Apart from having the php and mysql needed to run WordPress or Joomla, I was mainly interested in the hard drive space provided. At that time, the free option on Oxnull.net offered me 300 MB of disk space, which was the decisive factor in its favor. Yes, in fact, little has changed in seven years:

What I also liked and what you might like is the opportunity to get an already working website on one of the popular engines in one or two minutes after registration. For regular hosting, this has become mandatory, but for free then it’s something else. For a novice user, this “free hosting” was a godsend back then, because... A number of problems and issues related to the installation of engines (SMS) immediately disappeared.

All that was left to do was to add content and that’s it - a free website, forum or blog is ready to receive visitors. Although, of course, “adding content” is the main thing in creating a website, at first it seems that when the technical problems are solved and you don’t need to pay for hosting, then writing content will not be a problem. In any case, lowering the entry threshold in my case was precisely the main reason to use the services of Oxnull.net.

It goes without saying that if you don’t need any of this, then you can safely remove the installed engines. Immediately after registration, you are provided with information for accessing the site via FTP (login and password) and data from your MySQL database (database name, login and password for accessing it). You are also a third-level name (something like this: ktonanovenkogo.oxnull.net), which, if desired, you can then, for example, go to the site (if you are ready to buy it, or if you already have one).

I was especially pleased and in a good way surprised at Oxnull.net- communication with the administration. I have never met such friendly admins anywhere. It is a pleasure to communicate with such technical support! I’m not exaggerating at all, because I couldn’t expect such responsiveness from the owners of absolutely free hosting.

At first I contacted them only on issues related to server problems, but then I became completely insolent and began asking for advice on issues that had nothing to do with him. What is noteworthy is that in all cases I received a more than comprehensive answer and help, even to the point of writing small programs to solve my personal problems. Wow!

But the world has not stood still over the past seven years There are a lot of free hosting worthy of mention., and also those that already existed before were developed. It is difficult to determine a clear leader among them, so I will simply give a list of them and briefly go over their characteristics and the capabilities they provide. Well, your feedback in the comments will become an additional criterion in your choice.

If you want to offer a free hosting option known and approved by you, then describe it briefly so that the information can be quickly transferred to the article.

10 free hosting for a website with php and mysql support

I in no way want to single out leaders and outsiders among the hosting providers listed below that provide free access to their resources, because everyone has their own tasks, and to a certain extent everything depends on the notorious “lucky/unlucky” (what physical the server will get your site, what kind of “neighbors” there will be, whether their sites will be dossed and much more). By the way, this is just in case. In general, you choose for yourself, and I will just try to make this choice a little simpler for you.

Hostiman is a rather unusual player in the “free hosting” market, because in addition to regular hosting with support for PHP and MySQL, it also provides free VPS, which is generally “Wow”. Here you can get space for 2 websites of 2 GB in size (with PHP and MySQL) on a modern server with DDR4 and SSD drives (fast). And all this is free!
However, there are a number of nuances (read about them in a separate article) that are designed to prevent the possibility of using this service in “black and gray schemes”. As I already mentioned, there is also the opportunity to get free VPS/VDS servers (and very fast ones), however, there will be even more nuances for getting them. But “2x3700 MHz + 6 gb DDR4 + 40 gb SSD” for free! It's just some kind of holiday...
Hut— well suited for small sites (only 100MB of disk space is provided for free) or for beginners at the time of learning the art of webmastering, because there is support for PHP and MySQL, and access to files is provided not only via FTP, but also via SSH. For an additional fee, you can buy additional space, add a second-level domain and much more, but then it will no longer be free hosting. By default, there is advertising, which you can also turn off for money. In addition, there are user reviews that this hosting removes from free plans sites that have no traffic or low traffic. That's it.
Hostinger— their free tariff plan is quite tasty:
True, under the auspices of the fight against, etc. Unfortunately, from the beginning of this year they introduced SMS activation, which many did not like, because the message is paid and expensive. In general, many are outraged and indignant, because before this they spent years on the free tariff and didn’t give a damn.
000webhost- bourgeois free hosting with PHP and MySQL, as well as PHP mail and pre-installed Curl, GD2, ImageMagick. They provide 1.5 GB of space for a website and 100 GB for traffic. cPanel control. You can use two databases and link five domains. At the same time, there seems to be no advertising and very decent, as well as the speed of the sites. But somehow everything turns out suspiciously “smoothly”. Surely there are “childhood diseases” of all free hosting services - glitches. But these are just guesses...
CPanelHosting is a young provider with a free plan that includes support for PHP and MySQL.
It seems that everything you need is available (you can even select the desired PHP versions from 4 to 7 and, naturally, the control panel is), but there is not yet enough reviews to draw any conclusions about the stability and ease of working with it. For some, it will be important that hosting is provided virtually without registration (you indicate the email and all the necessary data is sent to it) and without any SMS (as in Hostinger recently).
nx0— this free hosting has some pretty nice features:
The truth is that many users are upset that in order to create their account they will have to verify their mobile phone number. For those who value anonymity, this option may not suit you.
BestOf— this project can be compared with the one mentioned at the beginning of Ohnul.net, because the approach to accepting sites is approximately the same. Only Russian-language sites are accepted, and free power is provided only to those who are liked by the administration. For example, they generally do not host entertainment, gaming and commercial projects. Otherwise, everything seems to be at the same level. The guys take under their wing (in terms of technical support) those projects that benefit people and are entirely useful to society. There is support for PHP and MySQL and everything else you might need. But once again I repeat that this “free hosting is not for everyone.”
Byethost- another bourgeois free hosting and again very good. There is everything a webmaster could dream of - a gigabyte of files, PHP and MySQL, five databases, a full-fledged .htaccess file, and no advertising. What more could you want? Probably stability, but this can only be verified experimentally.
ZZZ is a Ukrainian provider that provides a free hosting service with very good declared parameters and without advertising. How things really stand can only be checked in practice and unsubscribe a little lower in the comments.
Beget- a free hosting option from a fairly large provider.
Actually, everything is shown on the screenshot. Not that it’s very generous, but quite digestible. The question again is reliability and stability. One can hope that a major brand provides some kind of guarantee on the sanity of technical support and the stability of the servers.

10 more options for free website hosting

The options for implementing the “free hosting” concept described above are different in that, if you wish, you can easily collect your assets (site files, databases) and calmly go either to another free hosting, or to a paid one when you are ready for it. This, in fact, is their charm. Freedom.

However, there are a number of other options for free website placement on the network, when you don’t need to bother with the engine, and there will be practically no technical problems, and you can immediately get down to the main thing - filling the site with content. But often such simplicity entails the deprivation of that very freedom that was mentioned just above. It will be much more difficult to leave with your household to another place. However, these methods still deserve at least a mention.

So, You can still get free hosting in at least two cases:

If you decide to use a free (or partially free) website builder.
If you place your website (usually a blog) on so-called blogging platforms, which also provide this service for free.

The main disadvantage of these methods (besides the deprivation of freedom of movement) is also their complexity. Either the hoster will do this for you, or the profit will be less than it could be for a “free person”. However, if you don’t plan to make money from this, then creating a successful project even on a free platform is quite possible, and the network is full of such examples.

Let's let's start with free blogging platforms, where you can start creating your website. Their main advantage is the ease of setting up a future site and the ease of adding materials to it. Among the many similar “free hosting” services we can highlight:

Well, for a snack I can offer several options getting free hosting coupled with an online website builder. Their basic capabilities are free, and website creation is carried out at an intuitive level (many use the “grab and drag” method). True, there is a fly in the ointment - the source code of sites, as a rule, turns out to be “heavy”, and in some cases the functionality is still inferior to engines. However, “for free, even vinegar is sweet.”

Ucoz- very popular in RuNet. I wouldn’t say that creating websites on it is incredibly simple, but it’s still easier than doing it on an engine. The functionality is quite developed, there are detailed manuals, responsive Russian-language support, a bunch of free templates, it is friendly with Php and MySql (although it seems to be for a fee), but... This is the BUT. The more popular your site is, the more advertising there will be (sometimes even so much that visitors will flee from it).
Wix- very popular all over the world. The database is free and quite convenient for novice users, because it supports their favorite concept - pick it up and drag it with the mouse. This applies to literally everything, including website design. Lots of colorful (if not artsy) free templates. You can read more. It’s not jam-packed with advertising like Yukoz, but if you want a little more functionality or remove advertising altogether, you’ll have to pay for it.
A5— we can say that this is our clone of Vix. In its free version it is quite limited in functionality, but for simple sites it is quite suitable. Working with him is quite simple and pleasant.
Nethouse- if you need a website for business (it’s strange that you’re looking for free hosting, well, that’s your business), then this designer will help you design a business card website or even a store, but, however, in the free version you will be quite limited number of products and their photographs.
Jimdo— with the free plan you can build a pretty decent website with adaptation for mobile devices, and even third-party advertising won’t run on it, which is a good thing. But there are also many restrictions that are designed to “strangle your toad” and force you to fork out more. But don't give in!
Setup- another “our” craft (the brainchild of Seopult, as I understand it). Everything is simple and complex at the same time. It’s easy to design a website, but it will be difficult to fit into the Procrustean bed of the free plan.

In general, there is always a choice. A professional who “has eaten the dog” when it comes to website creation will definitely choose paid hosting, because the problems that arise are not worth wasting his time. A beginner, on the contrary, has the main free resource - time, and therefore will try to save money and at the same time gain the necessary experience in getting things done. Personally, that’s what I did at one time.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

Browser tricks

Regular web browsers do not have special tools that allow you to open blocked sites, but there are options for which this action is a “side” action. In Opera and Yandex Browser, such a tool is the Turbo traffic saving mode. So, if you want to speed up the opening of slow-loading pages, you will receive a pleasant bonus in the form of free access, for example, to Rutrecker.org.

In Opera, the Turbo option is enabled in the main menu.

In Yandex Browser - in the main settings.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox do not have a Turbo mode, but Google Translate may be useful for our purposes. The translated site opens in a separate frame, and access to it is no longer blocked.

If you have never used Google Translator, let us explain how to do it: insert the URL of the page you want to open into the left window and select the original language. Even if the page is in Russian, the original should be a foreign language, for example, English, and the translation language should be Russian. Then click the “Translate” button.

The result of opening Rutrecker.org, as can be seen in the screenshot, is quite decent.

Another way to bypass site blocking is to enter not a name, but an IP address in the address bar of the browser, which Whois services will help determine. For example, this one.

Unfortunately, browser “tricks” are not 100% effective: Google does not translate some sites, and in Turbo mode they also remain blocked, not only by name, but also by IP.

Special browser extensions

If you are unable to access the site using your browser's own means, a third-party extension will help solve the problem. One of the most popular tools for this purpose is FriGate (the link is given to the Chrome store, but it exists for other browsers).

FriGate encrypts and routes some of your web browser traffic through its own VPN server. This not only restores access to sites when blocked, but also speeds up the connection.

In addition to FriGate, there are many free extensions that have similar functions. Here are some of them:

Some of them require configuration after installation, for example, creating custom lists of web resources and rules, while others have only an on/off button and nothing more. Some extensions provide a choice of 3-4 available proxy servers, others do not. Use what suits you best, since there are many options. At least one will work.

Free VPN clients for Windows and other platforms

The main purpose of a VPN is to create closed communication channels to protect network traffic from leakage and outside access. However, this technology is also used to visit blocked Internet pages. Unlike anonymizers, which redirect the request to one site in the right direction, and browser extensions, which pass the traffic of one web browser through a proxy, VPN applications direct all network traffic of the computer into a closed channel.

Services for accessing VPN servers through a client program are usually paid (cost $1-50 per month depending on the channel bandwidth and the availability of additional options), but there are several free ones.

The best free VPN client for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile platforms, according to the author, is CyberGhost 6. Here are its most significant advantages in comparison with analogues:

There are no traffic volume restrictions. Most free applications of this format limit traffic to approximately 500 mb per month or for the entire period of use. If you need more, sign up for a paid subscription.
Quite high connection speed. Most free VPNs reduce it to a minimum.
Large selection of available servers around the globe. Many free analogues offer only one server, which is located somewhere in the USA and is constantly overloaded.
Several pre-installed profiles for different tasks (only half are available without payment, but this is quite enough for most tasks).
Can be used to access any type of web resource. Supports almost all types of traffic: video streaming, online games, social networks, etc., limits p2p.
Easy to learn for beginners.
Russified.

To get to a closed site using CyberGhost 6, just launch the program and select one of the available profiles.

When you select the anonymous surfing option (yellow tile), you just need to set the browser boot mode (normal or incognito) and specify the desired VPN server.

When choosing to unblock basic websites (blue tile), you just need to click on the corresponding icon.

Tor browser), which implements onion routing technology for Internet traffic.

The principle of data transmission over the Tor network differs from the usual one in that all transmitted information is encrypted multiple times (layer-by-layer) and follows a randomly built chain of proxy servers absolutely anonymously. Neither the intermediate node nor the end node receives information about the sender of the request and the route of the traffic. Each server reads exactly the information that is necessary to transmit the packet to the next node (figuratively removes its own layer of onion peel). Such a system provides the user with maximum privacy and makes tracking his traffic, if not impossible, then very difficult.

Not a single method of blocking web resources can withstand the onslaught of Tor. But only if Tor itself is not closed. Unfortunately, in Kazakhstan and Belarus, many connections of this wonderful instrument are blocked at the state level. In fact, this makes it impossible for the majority of the inhabitants of these countries to use it.

Tor is not yet banned in Russia, and its use does not threaten you with any sanctions.