[SOLVED] Making an app without proxy settings use system proxy on windows 11

[aden.anderson2001]

Hello. I'm hosting a connection from my phone to my router using an app called everyproxy. Therefor with whatever device i connect to that router i get that IP and port. I have set my windows settings on my PC to use that proxy, through windows settings. My phone-hosted IP is detected on my browser and windows apps but not in steam and my games, which dont have the option to follow system proxy. is there a fix for this? more precisely im hosting a VPN enabled connection from my phone because i cant use VPNs on my PC, so that my PC would have that VPN connection too, but steam and my games dont obey the proxy settings.

 

[bill001g]

So you seem to have a rather complex setup.

So does the below describe what you are doing ?

You have some kind of actual VPN software like Nord or hidemyip etc running on your phone.
You somehow share this to your router ?
You connect a PC to the same router and it using setting in the pc to cause it to use this connection.

I am surprised it even works at all. Your problem though is almost everything that is using a "proxy" is only using web traffic. Steam and many games do not actually run on a web browser. They use other data transfer methods. Very technically they are not using port 80 or 443.

So where is the internet connection. Do you have 2 internet connections, one on the router and a second on the phone. If we ignore the VPN part are you attempting to have the pc use the phones internet rather than the one on the router?

If you only have 1 internet connection on the main router and you are trying to use the phone as some kind of vpn server that is going to be very hard. It would be very complex even if you were to use a dedicated pc. Best case is to run a vpn on the router itself if it has that ability.

 

[aden.anderson2001]

So you seem to have a rather complex setup.

So does the below describe what you are doing ?

You have some kind of actual VPN software like Nord or hidemyip etc running on your phone.
You somehow share this to your router ?
You connect a PC to the same router and it using setting in the pc to cause it to use this connection.

I am surprised it even works at all. Your problem though is almost everything that is using a "proxy" is only using web traffic. Steam and many games do not actually run on a web browser. They use other data transfer methods. Very technically they are not using port 80 or 443.

So where is the internet connection. Do you have 2 internet connections, one on the router and a second on the phone. If we ignore the VPN part are you attempting to have the pc use the phones internet rather than the one on the router?

If you only have 1 internet connection on the main router and you are trying to use the phone as some kind of vpn server that is going to be very hard. It would be very complex even if you were to use a dedicated pc. Best case is to run a vpn on the router itself if it has that ability.

Well let me explain what I did again. I'm connect to a VPN on my phone, open everyproxy app on it and host a HTTP proxy. Now I don't know what it does but it kinda merges my router IP address, and the VPN address. Kind of mounting that VPN IP on my own IP. This causes my IP to be read as the VPN IP. Then on my pc, through windows settings, I set the proxy to use the IP and port given by the app, which are my default IP and port at the first place. Now as the app has done its thing, my proxy connection on pc let's me use use my internet with that VPN IP, without having an actual VPN on my pc. This is because I live in Iran and if you know what's going on here, this is the only way I can have VPN on my pc far as I can afford.
Now as this proxy I said, is being used by windows itself as i configured it in its settings, I expect everything to be tunneled by that proxy as every traffic flows through windows itself right? So the windows proxy settings should be global, and not only for my web browser. But some apps don't have the option to use system proxy, and instead detect them automatically, or use the raw IP address, not the one after proxy. So they see my default IP address instead of the one my VPN and proxy connection gives. And as many websites and services are censored here, I can't play my games as they're censored too. So I need a VPN for that. This is why I used this method to use a proxy to tunnel all traffic with it, which as steam or my games don't have a proxy configuration ability, they can't detect that proxy and censorship stays there for me.

 

[bill001g]

That is kinda what I suspected you were doing. Using the same connection both for the VPN (ie your home internet) as well to talk to your PC gives you a headache if you look in detail what is being done to the data.

I am surprised it works at all. It is extremely hard to configure a vpn when you only have 1 port, or I assume wifi connection. If this was a pc rather than a phone you might be able to do tricky stuff with routing commands but again this tends to be something very advanced and does not work well with all VPN providers.
In most cases to run a vpn box you need 2 ports, 1 that talks out to the vpn and a second one that talks to the local lan.

But your problems are much more basic.

Your key problem is you can only proxy HTTP/HTTPS traffic..ie web browser traffic..and most games do not run inside web browsers.

More technically only traffic using port 80 and 443 are being sent to the proxy. Games are using say port 25565 (minecraft) . Since 25565 is not one of the port that work on the proxy it is sent directly out your ISP connection.

It is actually more complex than just port numbers which tends to be the key difference between a VPN and a proxy. A VPN does all ports and protocols not just web browser traffic.

The simplest solution will be to put the vpn function on the PC. Many vpn providers you buy service from will allow limited number of devices to use the same account.

It gets very tricky when the government actively attempt to block VPN. They can block the common ports used by VPN just like they block steam or games. Most modern VPN have evolved to get past this using OPENVPN which mostly looks like HTTPS (ie encrypted web traffic). It is not actually web traffic so it does not pass through a proxy it just externally uses the same ports. China actually has a way to detect the difference between vpn running on the port and actual web traffic even with the traffic encrypted.

Even if they don't get fancy like china they can easily just block all the IP ranges used say but NORD or IPvanish. You might find a smaller vpn provider that they have not blocked. You seem to have one that works on your phone.

The way that tends to work that is very hard for even government to block is to run your own vpn service. If you have a friend in another country that will trust you enough they can use their router to provide a vpn service just to you. The other way to is to buy a virtual vpn server from some large company like amazon or google and use that. They can't block all the cloud server addresses used by these providers without blocking massive amounts of other servers also using these data centers. Although more expensive than your more common vpn these are almost undetectable and not easily blocked...unless they are watching you in particular.

 

[aden.anderson2001]

That is kinda what I suspected you were doing. Using the same connection both for the VPN (ie your home internet) as well to talk to your PC gives you a headache if you look in detail what is being done to the data.

I am surprised it works at all. It is extremely hard to configure a vpn when you only have 1 port, or I assume wifi connection. If this was a pc rather than a phone you might be able to do tricky stuff with routing commands but again this tends to be something very advanced and does not work well with all VPN providers.
In most cases to run a vpn box you need 2 ports, 1 that talks out to the vpn and a second one that talks to the local lan.

But your problems are much more basic.

Your key problem is you can only proxy HTTP/HTTPS traffic..ie web browser traffic..and most games do not run inside web browsers.

More technically only traffic using port 80 and 443 are being sent to the proxy. Games are using say port 25565 (minecraft) . Since 25565 is not one of the port that work on the proxy it is sent directly out your ISP connection.

It is actually more complex than just port numbers which tends to be the key difference between a VPN and a proxy. A VPN does all ports and protocols not just web browser traffic.

The simplest solution will be to put the vpn function on the PC. Many vpn providers you buy service from will allow limited number of devices to use the same account.

It gets very tricky when the government actively attempt to block VPN. They can block the common ports used by VPN just like they block steam or games. Most modern VPN have evolved to get past this using OPENVPN which mostly looks like HTTPS (ie encrypted web traffic). It is not actually web traffic so it does not pass through a proxy it just externally uses the same ports. China actually has a way to detect the difference between vpn running on the port and actual web traffic even with the traffic encrypted.

Even if they don't get fancy like china they can easily just block all the IP ranges used say but NORD or IPvanish. You might find a smaller vpn provider that they have not blocked. You seem to have one that works on your phone.

The way that tends to work that is very hard for even government to block is to run your own vpn service. If you have a friend in another country that will trust you enough they can use their router to provide a vpn service just to you. The other way to is to buy a virtual vpn server from some large company like amazon or google and use that. They can't block all the cloud server addresses used by these providers without blocking massive amounts of other servers also using these data centers. Although more expensive than your more common vpn these are almost undetectable and not easily blocked...unless they are watching you in particular.

If possible can you explain more about someone from another country hosting a connection for me from their router? If there is a guide for it, I can read and learn from that, otherwise please explain the steps and how it can charge that person (legally, financially, etc). I might just be able to ask a friend to do that for me but I need to know the consequences for them. Thank you for your time

 

[bill001g]

In some ways it is simple but they need 2 or maybe 3 things.

First they need a public IP address. You can't get to their router unless they have their own IP address. The vast majority of people do but you need to check this. Although you can look up what a public or private IP is what tends to be the simplest is look at the IP that is assigned to the WAN port of the router. Compare this with a site like whatsmyip. If the IP are the same then it is a public IP that is directly assigned to the router. If they are different then they would need to contact the ISP and see if it is possible to have get a public IP. Sometime you just ask, other want a extra fee, and some like say mobile broadband the their technology makes it too hard for them to give you one.

Next you need a way to find this IP if it changes. This is called DYNDNS. Most routers have this function but it can also just be run on a PC. This allows you to just use a name rather than they having to say email your new IP when it changes. Most time the IP does not change even over many months.
Now this is different that what is called a static IP which never changes. That also is a feature you tend to have to pay for but for most people dyndns is good enough. My IP has not changed in more than a year.

The last things you they is a router that can run as a VPN server. This has gotten much more common. These routers are sold as being able to remotely access the servers in your house but they also allow remote internet access in most cases. Many asus and tplink routers have this function.

There are all kinds of video and things talking about how to remotely access your house. This is pretty much the same thing you want to do. You will need to load something like a openvpn client on your PC.

The only other thing that can mess you up is since the traffic that appears as download to you is actually upload from the remote side a internet with a very small upload rate can be problematic. Not as big a issue but you will just have to be respectful and not for example download from steam at very high rates if the person only has say 10 mbps upload rate