[plug] Proxy serving, and dial-on-demand

[Matt Kemner]

On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Greg Mildenhall wrote:

> > * FTP Proxy
> Squid does this also, but an FTP proxy is not often useful on a small
> LAN. If you use IP masquerading and the "ip_masq_ftp.o" module, clients
> can do a normal (non-proxied) FTP.

Greg, I think you're confusing "proxy" with "cache" :)
It was my understanding proxy means "to act on behalf of someone" and
cache (in this context) means "to store proxied data for later re-use"

But what you're saying is still valid as long as you s/proxy/cache/g :)
Using ftp masquerade would probably be the best option.

> > * NNTP Proxy
> Are you sure you want to proxy NNTP? It is very rare to need the same news
> article twice, so you are almost certainly better off using
> IP-masquerading to let the client machine connect to your ISP's NNTP
> server directly. 

IP Masquerade will proxy your nntp and smtp etc sessions for you -
transparently.

To the original poster: since you are new to linux, I assume you don't
know what masquerading is... Masquerading allows linux to proxy all types
of internet connections, transparently - instead of WinGate, which has a
seperate proxy for each major service, and makes you do all sorts of weird
and wonderful hacks on your other PCs to work with the proxy (things like
youremail#yourisp.net.au at 192.168.0.1 are just soooo UGLY :)) Linux allows
you to just point your other PCs (and Macs etc) at the Linux machine as a
gateway, and it will automatically intercept the traffic and proxy it.
This works great for most things..

Combined with the latest pppd, which does dial-on-demand, and linux
firewalling, you have everything you need and more :)

(you can even play quake over your masqueraded link.. I'd like to see that
with wingate (: )

 - Matt Kemner
System Administrator/BOFH        "Words are too feeble,
Networx Internet                  they cannot contain"
(08) 9 345 3377                   Live, "Stage"