Monday, November 22, 2004

simple HTTP proxy

So there I was trying to get RSS feeds to work in centericq when I realised I had a problem. I need to use a proxy server to access feeds from outside of Rhodes, but the university's proxies forbid me from fetching pages that are on the local network. Centericq has no concept of proxy exclude lists :(

The problem is actually more complicated than that ... centericq also has no concept of proxy authentication.

A lot of people at Rhodes get around these problem by running a copy of squid on their own machine. This has always seemed a bit of overkill to me. Squid is overly complex for the task at hand. What I need is a simple proxy server that can make these decisions for me — basically the equivalent of Rhodes' proxy.pac auto-configuration file.

I had a hunt around at simple proxy servers (like tinyproxy). Everything I found either didn't do exclude lists, or didn't do authentication, or both. Then I discovered the HTTP::Proxy Perl module. This provides a simple way to write a custom proxy server. Just what I needed.

The result is simpleproxy. It has some config variables at the top. Other than that it just runs as a daemon and sends requests to the right place.

posted by guy at: 21:56 SAST | path: /general | permanent link