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My school requires a proxy for all internet access. If you want to use the internet, it is impossible to not use a proxy. This makes it a problem for many programs that don't seem to let you enter proxy settings.

How can I use Steam when I am behind a proxy? Is it possible to somehow enter the details into a configuration file, or force it to get the settings from Internet Explorer?

If not, does software exist for creating a 'virtual' network adapter which will pass all traffic (or all protocol x traffic) through the proxy?

Although I am facing this specific problem on Windows 7, solutions for all operating systems are welcome.

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Good question, I would love to see a good proxy solution – Ivo Flipse♦ Aug 5 '09 at 11:06
Just curious, why to use Steam at school? – Kirill Aug 5 '09 at 11:29
JIa3ep: To play games on? Often our teacher organizes mini LAN 'parties' with sucky mac games. – joshhunt Aug 5 '09 at 14:04
Hi Josh. Could you please help vote to reopen my other Steam question, if you agree with it being on-topic for SU? Thank you. superuser.com/questions/121910/… – Chris W. Rea Mar 19 '10 at 22:58
@Chris: I do not have the powers to reopen questions myself, I can only vote to reopen them. However, I don't agree that the question suits SU enough to be reopened. – joshhunt Mar 20 '10 at 16:39
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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Check out Proxifier. Combined with an SSH tunnel, you should be able to get most programs through any proxy.

My school (and all the others in my state) have a quite elaborate web filtering proxy set up which blocks most ports on the other side of the proxy. I managed to get around it using a combination of the programs mentioned above on Windows.

Just create an SSH tunnel using Putty as necessary, and then set Proxifier to use the tunnel as its proxy. This should route traffic of all ports through the proxies.

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Where do you point the tunnel endpoints? – Michael Caron Jan 24 at 17:41
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up vote 1 down vote

To the best of my knowledge, Steam uses the default proxy settings in Internet Explorer. You can run into issues if you use a proxy script, but they're easy to work around. Just dig around in the script for the proxy addresses and set them up as your proxies, and Steam should work just fine.

If you continue to have issues, you should look on the Steam forums. Valve's Steam developers typically troll the tech support/help forums and provide assistance where necessary.

If you're having issues with individual Steam games, you're probably out of luck, since they tend to use specific ports.

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It doesn't use the system proxy settings (just checked with Wireshark). – Etienne Perot Dec 29 '11 at 23:58
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up vote 0 down vote

Not all proxies don't allow all ports to be accessed so what you describe isn't actually possible.

If you can access https:// URLs and have access to a machine on the outside then you could set up a VPN server on the external machine and run a VPN on your machine to tunnel all traffic through that server. You will be able to access this server as long as you run the VPN on port 443 and it uses SSL for handshaking.

I've done this before on Linux but using SSH but it's certainly possible on Windows (provided you can find a free VPN that supports the above).

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up vote 0 down vote

Your best bet is to set the proxy info in Internet Settings in control panel, if your Uni uses a proxy configuration script then you can navigate to that file in your web browser and check out the manual settings or you can run with the script and hope for the best. Steam should work after that. My uni only recently prevented non-proxy steam access so that they could throttle steam download speeds... :(

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