[plug] cascading proxies -- summary

[Denis Brown]

Dear PLUG members,

Sincere thanks to those who replied regarding the possibility of cascading 
proxies, or at least being able to masquerade as a user on another network 
for legitimate purposes!  Following the initial burst of replies, Steve and 
Matt made suggestions about cgiproxy and port forwarding respectively.  On 
the basis of Steve's suggestion coming through first I visited the site 
www.jmarshall.com (James Marshall) and downloaded the cgi script.  It 
appeared to do what I wanted.

Cut a long story short I downloaded it and got it to run under Apache 1.3.6 
but kept getting error messages back to the browser including doubling-up 
of the http:// prefix on every request.  A few e-mails to the author 
(James) suggested an upgrade to Apache was in order.  So 1.3.12 source was 
downloaded and installed (of course thanks to the Linux/Unix philosophy, no 
rebooting necessary <grin>) but no change.  Then I recalled that I'd 
specified the absolute IP address of my server box, from the days before it 
was registered in our DNS.  Changed to the mnemonic representation minus 
http:// prefix and problem solved!

The disadvantage of this cgiproxy approach is that the intermediate server 
box has to be as fast as possible to keep down the latency of request 
processing.  This is of course an ideal excuse to build something a bit 
better than my current 486SX 33MHz 32MB configuration.  I will also have a 
look at Matt's port forwarding suggestion on the basis that it appears 
(intuitively) to be a faster method.  I'll also continue researching the 
previously mentioned suggestions not only from the implementation 
standpoint but importantly from the knowledge viewpoint.

Thanks again,
Denis