Skywire VPN/Proxy for Beginners

How to use Skycoin’s fast and free VPN/Proxy service

Have you been IP-banned from your favorite website? Does your ISP block access to ‘subversive’ sites? Do you want to torrent movies anonymously?

Then you need the Skywire VPN/Proxy! It’s fast, free and easy to use.

This guide assumes you already have a working Skywire node, and that you’re running the Firefox browser with the FoxyProxy extension.

1. Use your browser to log in to the Skywire Node Manager and then select your manager node from the list.
2. Click the ‘terminal’ icon and type ‘hostname -I’ (that’s a capital i). Make a note of the IP address displayed. You will need this for step 7.
3. Click on the ‘Connect to Node’ icon under ‘Apps’.
4. Click on ‘Search Services’ and select an exit node in a country of your choice. Sometimes it takes a while to find an operational exit node, so to speed things up you can instead enter a node key and app key for one of the top Skywire nodes by uptime listed here.
5. If you see a green ‘node client’ box indicating a successful connection, then you can exit the Skywire Node Manager. Otherwise, try different exit nodes until you make a successful connection.
6. Click the FoxyProxy icon in your browser, select ‘Options’, then ‘Add’.
7. Enter these settings, then click ‘Save’: Type=SOCKS5, Title=name, Port=9443, IP=192.168.x.x (the address noted in step 2). (But if you previously set up Port Forwarding as explained here, then enter the Port Forwarding IP address instead of the manager node address).
8. Click the FoxyProxy icon again and select “Use proxy name for all URLs”.
9. Browse to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com and confirm your IP address has changed to an address in the country of your chosen exit node. Done!

If you get stuck, visit the Skywire Telegram Group where Skycoin’s friendly technical support team will be happy to help.