26 Nov
2017
26 Nov
'17
6:24 a.m.
William Cheswick <ches(a)cheswick.com> writes:
[snip]
I used this code when I worked at 6200 Broad St. in Reynoldsburg.
Someone hooked it into the web browsers at the time which would have
been Mosaic. At some point I got a hold of the client side code and I
"ported" it to NetBSD so I could use utilities when I was dialed back
into the company. I think I hooked it into ssh at one point, but it has
been a long time, and I don't exactly remember. I know I hooked in the
NetBSD ftp and telnet clients.
I do know that at 6200, and probably company wide, this whole scheme was
replaced by filtering firewalls of some ilk and the proxy gateway was
done away with. That would have been early 2000s or so, assuming my
memory is not faulty.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org - & - http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
Paul
Nope, not IP over Datakit, as I recall. It was quite interesting to work at a site (Bell
Labs) where there were two distinct network technologies.
We connected to a lot of familiar services through Datakit using the application level.
For example, the smtp client in upas connected to an SMTP service thus:
if ((s = ipcopen(path, "")) < 0) {
where path might be one of:
tcp!bowell!smtp
dk!coma/astro/nj!smtp
inet!ftp.uu.net <http://ftp.uu.net/>!smtp
On V10 Unix and in Plan 9, these were handled by stuff that Dave Presotto wrote. I
distributed this code throughout internal AT&T.
The first is the obvious tcp connection. Datakit connected to a server running in V10’s
equivalent to inetd. The last one was a proxy connection, a circuit-level gateway running
on a particular host that I supported for many years. It had a little protocol and
initiated the tcp link from the proxy machine.
These proxy machines had some interesting features. For one, I could log the destination
of volume of each connection. For another, all connections to a sensitive site (think
porn) seemed to come from the proxy host. Some porn sites showed their top ten users, and
several major corporations were represented there.
This library was socks about seven years before socks, originally written by Presotto and
Howard Trickey. The relay program was originally called “gated”, but that wouldn’t do
after a while. I renamed it “proxyd”, and that is the first use of “proxy" in this
context that I am aware of.
If you were on AT&T’s intranet and wanted to connect externally, you ripped out the
entire socket dance and replaced it with an ipcopen call. I also distributed common
modified clients, like ptelnet, pftp, pfinger, etc.
I still have all this code, and I suppose it ought to go in an archival repository. I
can’t imagine that AT&T/Lucent/Alcatel/Nokia would care at this point. Anyone want it?