proxytools-announce

[proxyTools-announce] localProxy anon proxy service

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Here's an anon proxy service for localproxy.

Add the following to the services section of your config file:

    <item key="10082">
     <hash>
      <item key="class">anonHttpProxy</item>
      <item key="friendlyName">standard</item>
      <item key="isEnabled">1</item>
      <item key="localPort">10082</item>
     </hash>
    </item>

and configure the web browser to use the proxy at localhost:10082.

Security: It's 100% anonymous if my statProxy results are correct and up 
to date in the hosts.xml file, and there are no localProxy bugs. If you do 
it the way I've shown above, you will get a distributed anmon service 
(it uses many anon proxies on the Internet), so it's sometimes hard to 
be sure that *all* the proxies you might use are anon at the time. If that's 
a problem, you need to use a single known anon proxy and test it 
*every* time you browse. I don't think there is much need for this; if 
there is, please ask and I'll provide the config.

UAE web browsing with this is just as fast as non-anonymous browsing, 
because it can use the local proxies (which *are* anonymous proxies!).

This and all the other example configs are in help/config-example.txt.
Note this example file has been renamed; it wasn't displaying from 
the localProxy manual front page because of the non-xml comments.

-wayne

[proxyTools-announce] oops sorry, new localproxy is v3.93/3.81

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Got it wrong. lp is v3.93(GUI) and v3.81(back end).

[proxyTools-announce] old UAE proxy vulnerability returns. new localProxy finds it.

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

LocalProxy 3.90/3.80 was just committed to CVS.

This one is interesting for the UAE (and maybe KSA) guys. 

The short story is that I got sidetracked from making the Windows executable 
(sorry!) and implemented commStrat 2. This is the one that allows outgoing 
queries to be modified/escaped and otherwise encoded in different ways. 
This code has been in there for many versions, but I never enabled commStrat 2 
except for some very simple tests months ago.There are about 6 different methods 
implemented (mostly from Rain Forest Puppy's whisker), and I expect them to work 
in KSA. 

While testing it I noticed that several UAE proxies are vulnerable to the old 
fqdn -> dotted quad IP address conversion. Obviously using this will offer faster 
web surfing than (say) CONNECT proxies, or the non-standard port proxies, so I've 
left commStrat 2 enabled and defaulted the methods used for URL modification to 
just that one.

LocalProxy will do it's usual thing and look at all the strategies it has available and 
pick the best one.

This also means that things like Craig's Alstone proxy and Unfrozen etc. will work 
in the UAE again, if the right proxies are chosen. 67, 69, 75 are ok, 68 is nfg, the 
rest are untested so far.

Note that there's a safety aspect to this: The UAE proxies will log such requests. 
I don't see this as much of a problem any more. We have enough experience with 
Etisalat (and presumably it's guidelines from above) to see that they don't prosecute 
such behaviour. Anyway, the commStrat 0 and commStrat 1 strategies (direct connect 
on unblocked ports, and CONNECT tunnelling give away just as much information. 
I'm happy to do it this way. Your risk is your decision.

If you want to disable commStrat 2, the easiest way is to edit comStrats.xml and change  
isEnabled for item '2' to 0 instead of the 1 it is now.

Another change in this localProxy is that it automatically refreshes the 'access denied' 
types of page when it detects them. That means lp will select a different strategy and 
(probably) retrieve the pahge properly.

Also the logging now logs everything going out which may have been changed (commStrat 2) 
as well as everything coming in like before. This bumps up the traffic a lot if you're doing lots 
of commStrat 2 requests, but at least you can see how your request is modified.

-wayne

[proxyTools-announce] localProxy data file bug

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Hi,

I just discovered that I've forgotten to add the KSA proxies into the hosts.xml 
distributed with the latest localProxy package. Damn! The firewall rules etc. are 
there, but not the actual proxies and their capabilities.

Will fix today or tomorrow. My apologies to those testing it there.

The symptoms of this should be that in a KSA user would find that localProxy 
would only use some of the 9081 port proxies in layer 0 and (since these are limited 
demos - 2 users) things would go slowly, and fail often. When I add the ISP hosts in, 
localProxy will be able to use them as CONNECT capable proxies and o a much 
better job.

Soon...

-wayne

[proxyTools-announce] localProxy (GUI v3.51) file release

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Hi y'all, 

I finally got around to placing a zip of localProxy up on sourceforge.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/proxytools/localProxy01-08-24.zip

This is a current CVS package.

-wayne

[proxyTools-announce] new localProxy is finally out

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

LocalProxy 2001/8/21 release.

I need some help with testing this one. 
CVS files only, so far. Available at:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/proxytools/localProxy2/
(don't forget the help directory too!).
I'll get a zip up there in a day or two.

The changes are extensive, and may not play well with older operating 
systems like win98/ME. Also localProxy tries to get smart about 
analyzing it's network environment which means the user has less 
control over which proxies get used in which layers. 
The whole thing builds itself up from the provided databases and a few 
user provided bits (in the config-<userConfigName>.xml file). 
The user may overload *any* piece of info from the databases.

It's great when it works (and it does, for me), but the lack of 
control won't be so good if it goes crazy.

I include a database (hosts.xml) with many of the non-standard port 
	proxies posted (mostly by dubaidreamteam) to the proxy-elites mailing 
	list. They die in a few days, but there are many in there. 
	Many of them should be useful in KSA too. 
	I had so many in some layers I had to place a limit on the numbers.
	This limit is 15, unless you overload the tag maxNrHostsPerLayer 
	(see config-wayne.xml and config-User0.xml for examples)
	
I include a new tool to make these xml databases 'hostMerge.pl'. 
	Use: 
	statProxy -t 0:9:12:13:14 -l <file of proxies>
	to get the proxy capabilities localproxy needs to know about, then 
	put the results in a file (say, statProxyOut) and run:
	mergeHosts.pl statProxyOut
	The result is a new (bigger) hosts.xml with the new proxies added, 
	and old ones updated if necessary. The old hosts is saved.

KSA configurations:
	I include all the firewall information I have in the firewalls.xml 
	configuration file. I also include an example KSA-zajil config file 
	(config-KSA-zajil.xml) which shows you how to make one for any ISP 
	there. It should be easy as long as the firewalls.xml file contains 
	the ISP information. Madani was most helpful recently in providing 
	the critical information used in this file. 
	It was a complicated boring job to construct it, so no doubt I have 
	made mistakes. Let me know about them please.

	To make a config-KSA-yourIsp.xml config file (which you will select 
	in the GUI) just copy config-KSA-zajil.xml to config-KSA-yourIsp 
	where yourIsp is the name used for the firewall your ISP uses in 
	the firewalls.xml file. Start the GUI, select this new config 
	and 'start services'.

A couple of new options in the GUI:
	'log all' logs *all* data passing through localProxy (including binary).
	'get stats' displays error statistics by host
	'show config' displays the complete running data - very handy
	'run setup script' runs a user defined .bat for each configuration 
	(file: script-yourConfig.bat). I use it to do my shell login with ssh 
	(which, in turn, starts some encrypted, port forwarded tunnels). 
	Those forwarded tunnels can then be used as layer 0 services in 
	localProxy (a news service, for example).

I've found a way to do non-blocking socket connects in MS Windows! 
	It works well in win2000, and WinME. I will use it more extensively 
	(the rest of localProxy and the other proxyTools) if it works on all 
	platforms.

Non-blocking reads/writes were trivial by comparison :-)

I remembered why localProxy went slow. 
	I forgot I disabled the CONNECT socket pool in the released versions. 
	I did that for a reason (a proxy admin got upset during testing, 
	so I thought it best not to leave it enabled by default). 
	Restoring that seems to have brought the old speed back, but it's 
	subjective, of course.

[proxyTools-announce] new release of proxyTools and localProxy sources

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Hi,

I want to get on with new additions to localProxy, but I also want 
to stabilize the current version. There are many installation issues, and 
maybe even a few bugs :-) I want to get these problems out of the way 
before hitting you with a new set.

So, I'm branching the CVS tree at this point. Development will go 
on as before in the 'trunk', but a 'stable' branch will appear from 
today. After some fixes, I will consider that branch stabilized, merge the 
changes there back into the main trunk and branch off another 'stable' 
version for the non-developers.

File releases of both localProxy and proxyTools are now available at 
today's branch point. To get these, go to the proxytools sourceforge 
project page and look in packages 'localProxy' and 'proxyTools' for 
the latest (only) file releases. I will wait to hear from a few people who 
try these before making Windows executables for both.

All support on the proxy-elites list will be devoted to stable branches 
only in future. When the stable packages are updated, CVS should be 
used to get new versions - make sure you use the tag 'Branch-Stable-...'.

The sourceforge bug tracker and the 'users' list should be used for 
support by those who wish to keep up with the latest versions.
And, of course, the normal CVS system for the files.

-wayne

References:
Proxytools sourceforge main page: http://proxytools.sourceforge.net/
which links to all of the following:

Package downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/proxytools/

CVS browsing and latest 'branch - stable' downloads for localProxy:
	http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/proxytools/localProxy2/?only_with_tag=Branch-Stable-2001-7-19

CVS browsing and latest 'branch - stable' downloads for proxyTools:
	http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/proxytools/proxyTools/?only_with_tag=Branch-Stable-2001-7-19

(Pick the right tag in future for both of those, of course.)

Bug tracker:
	https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=380177&group_id=23974&func=browse

Users mailing list:
	Post to:
		pro...@li...
	Archives (not available yet): http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/11365/0/

[proxyTools-announce] XMLViewer Unicode bug workaround

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Hi,

I finally saw this error on my development machine:

Bareword found where operator expected at (eval 15) line 2, near "tr/\0-\x{FF}//UC"

It turns out that the author of XMLViewer used the 'tr' expression because it was 
the unicode conversion interface the Perl porters expected to use after Perl 5.006.
But they changed their collective minds, and removed it later (replacing it with use 
of special patterns in the 'pack' function.

I guess the author (and then Activestate) will release a fixed version soon, but for 
the moment I have hacked my version of XMLViewer to get rid of the message.

To do this:
1. go to (probably) c:\perl\site\lib\Tk\
2. remove the read only attribute from  XMLViewer.pm 
3. edit the file and replace these lines (423-431):

if ($] >= 5.006) {
    # unicode translator available
    eval <<'EOF';
sub _convert_from_unicode {
    $_[0] =~ tr/\0-\x{FF}//UC; 
    $_[0];
}
EOF
} else {

with:

#if ($] >= 5.006) {
    # unicode translator available
#    eval <<'EOF';
#sub _convert_from_unicode {
#    $_[0] =~ tr/\0-\x{FF}//UC; #wayne - it was removed - see pack('U0'..)
#    $_[0];
#}
#EOF
#} else {

4. replace this (line 449):

}

with:

#}

5. save. Check the message has disappeared.

Assuming his code for use prior to 5.006 worked, this should be ok.

I don't think we will be using any Unicode anywhere in these config files 
anyway, so this fix is probably unnecessary.

-wayne

[proxyTools-announce] latest versions of localProxy and proxyTools

[wayne <wa...@ny...>]

Hi all,

These are the current latest, 'stable' versions of the proxyTools 
and localProxy packages. Please give them a try and report bugs or 
problems asap. 

Features are now frozen and only bugs will be fixed.

LocalProxy sources and MS Windows executables:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/proxytools/localProxy2Win-2.0.2.zip

Localproxy sources (need Perl installed):
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/proxytools/localProxy2-2.0.2.zip

ProxyTools sources (need Perl installed):
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/proxytools/proxyTools-2.0.3.zip

Please read the help-*.txt docs (esp. help-faq.txt), though 
localProxy should run 'out of the box' for almost everyone.

-wayne