Re: SOCKS

[Stefan Laudat <stefan () ns art ro>]

On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Patrick Hayden wrote:

> This may be a lame question, but I'd like help trying to figure out how 
> SOCKS compares to a traditional proxy server.  What software do I need at 
> the SOCKS server and what do I need at a client machine?  Do I need a 
> special SOCKS-ified version of Telnet and FTP in order to traverse the 
> SOCKS host?

        It depends on which version of SOCKS you intend to use. Aventail's
Autosocks should work best with a linux socks5 (ftp.nec.com?) server, but
it failed when using a WinGate socks server. For a more detailed and
restricted access you might want to use the IP masquerade support found in
all recent  linux kernels. A new socks connection starts a new process on
the server (fork() child or maybe a thread in newer versions), but on a 
masquerading system a kernel connection handler will barely take more than
100 bytes.

Stefan Laudat
Unix System Engineer