WebOne Proxy for vintage computers
WebOne is a proxy server designed to make the web usable again with vintage computers. The biggest pain is SSL, which old computers can hardly handle and now the whole world started moving towards forcing HTTPS connections, technically making accessing the web from old machines impossible. This is where a proxy like WebOne becomes handy.
https://github.com/retronas/retronas/wiki/WebOne
Running on a machine (Windows or Linux) in your local network it can strip the requests of the secure layer and serve a plain old HTTP website to your old machines. It can also do a lot of other fancy stuff if you want it to, like converting images, processing videos, etc.
It works well on newer RaspberryPis like the RPi3 or RPi4 and I've installed it on mine. The installation is pretty straight forward.
First, get the WebOne package for your system.
In my case it was:
wget https://github.com/atauenis/webone/releases/download/v0.16.0/webone.0.16.0.linux-armhf.deb
Install the package and it's dependencies:
sudo apt install ./webone.0.16.0.linux-armhf.deb
Restart the service:
sudo service webone restart
The configuration file of the service can be found here, edit this to change the settings to your taste:
Don't forget to restart the WebOne service if you modify the config file.
Take note of your Raspberry Pi's IP address (ifconfig) and the Port value in the webone.conf, then go ahead and set those in your web browser on your retro machine.
For example on a Macintosh Classic II, take Netscape Navigator 2.0.2, go to Options -> Network Preferences, then select the Proxies tab.
Select Manual Proxy configuration and click the View button.
To the HTTP Proxy field enter the IP address of your newly configured WebOne Proxy server and it's port, then click OK.
In the Network Preferences window the OK button is probably out of screen on a compact Mac, so just press Enter to apply the settings and close the window.
That's all, you can browse the web again!
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