I want a SIMPLE gateway

Markus Stumpf (stumpf@informatik.tu-muenchen.de)
Fri, 12 Nov 1993 22:55:57 +0100


Hi,

currently libwww has some gateway code (back in, it was completely
broken in libwww9a (the version xmosaic2.0 and lynx use).
Why does it have to be as sophisticated as it is?
All the clients have e.g. gopher and html parsing capabilities.
Can we have a simple gateway code (maybe with a compile switch) that
does nothing else as to first send a line with the address and port to
a gateway server, this opens a connection to the specified host, sends
everything else the client sended and returns all the destination server
sended. This would make it really easy to write kinda firewall server.
(yes, I know of the socks package, but I don't want to enable every
"nonstandard" gopher, http port in the world).
The line could be e.g. a partial URL like
http://some.univ.edu:80/

Oh, and it would be nice to be able to specify "local domains" and
addresses that don't require gatewaying on the client side.

I'd looked at the code, but it's more than a "quick hack", so before
spending lots of hours learning about the internas of libwww I'd thought
I first ask the people familiar with the code whether they'll do it :-)

Have a nice weekend
\Maex

-- 
______________________________________________________________________________
 Markus Stumpf                        Markus.Stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE