Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

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ChronicEel93
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu 29 Sep, 2016 7:17 pm

Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

Post by ChronicEel93 »

About two years ago, some genius launched Old Web Today, a service that loads up a copy of an old web browser and routs traffic through several internet archives. There is a list of software that is used for this, and I am left wandering if there is not a way to set up a proxy server that PCEM can use to browse the old internet. This seems like it would be a great help, trying to do anything with stock win98 IE5 is like trying to pull teeth, even after jumping through several hoops to install the 128bit cypher. I know I can use a nt compat layer and a newer browser, but that kind of defeats the point. I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out how it was supposed to work, but basically have no idea what I'm doing. If I make a breakthrough, I'll post it here; but in the mean time, if anyone else wants to take a crack at it, be my guest! This is not a feature request, and is only tangentially related to PCEM.
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leilei
Posts: 1039
Joined: Fri 25 Apr, 2014 4:47 pm

Re: Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

Post by leilei »

A proxy to transparently handle all web redirection to httpCOLON//web.archive.org/web/(whatevercurrenttimeadndateyourcomputeris)fw_/(url) and filter out the IA's system/error pages? Sounds like something that should be trivial to implement in theory... a nice extra touch to that would be to trickle the bandwidth to 1-3kb per second
amadama
Posts: 57
Joined: Mon 25 Aug, 2014 9:47 pm

Re: Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

Post by amadama »

This already exists. It was written by Antoni (Tenox) a few years ago. Works great and it's cool to browse modern websites with NCSA Mosaic...

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
ChronicEel93
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu 29 Sep, 2016 7:17 pm

Re: Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

Post by ChronicEel93 »

Nice to know, and I can probably use this to make browsing the net on my win98 machine bearable, but I was hoping to get a proxy server that routed traffic through an Internet archive service such as Wayback. This would not only make the web work, but let me see the web as it was.
ChronicEel93
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu 29 Sep, 2016 7:17 pm

Re: Internet Archive Replay through Procy Server Viability

Post by ChronicEel93 »

Got wrp working, and a few years ago it might have had alot of utility, but the fact is that wrp does not work with https websites, and as basically everything uses https now, nothing really works. That is one of the reason I want to get the other thing working. As far as I can tell, all I need is to run pywb in proxy mode and point it at the wayback archive. I'm having problems when it comes to actually telling pywb where the wayback archive actually is. It seems to only accept local archives, and while I could painstakingly build up a small collection of websites downloaded from the wayback archive, it would be much easier just to point pywb to the website. If I'm being stupid, please call me out on it, between this and finals I'm getting a headache.
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