RE: squid as a socks server

From: James Harper <james.harper_at_bendigoit.com.au>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:40:02 +0000

Forging a reply as I'm not actually subscribed to -dev and the replies didn't cc me...

> What is wrong with the dante socks server ? Why the effort with squid supporting
> socks ?

Much easier to maintain a single set of rules. I installed Dante but the group auth modules appear to be $$$ extras.

Also reporting on squid logs is already a solved problem. Merging squid and dante logs to try and report would be harder

>> Is anyone working on this?

> Not since I gave up on that branch. My SOCKS configuration an testing skills were
> not up to the task. If you have better success you are welcome to continue it.

> The problem I faced at the end was that Squid was apparently transiting traffic
> and I could not identify whether it was arriving as HTTP-over-SOCKS or HTTP-over-TCP,
> so there was no way to identify if the socks-enabled versus socks-disabled port
> settings were working or not.

I took a slightly different approach and created a socks_port config option, which at the moment simply duplicates the http_port (eg it understands HTTP not SOCKS). I'm not sure whether it really belongs in a different file or can be incorporated into the existing file.

The SOCKS protocol itself is very simple, the only exception maybe being authentication and encryption (I think socks5 can be encrypted). A basic connect-only implementation shouldn't be that hard, but it would be nice to also use bind and udp as then squid could be a complete gateway solution instead of just http/https/ftp like it is now. That would be harder though, obviously.

James
Received on Wed Mar 13 2013 - 08:40:34 MDT

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