Firewall Gateways (Proxies)

In This Section...

Client Setup
Server Setup
Caching

Setting Up Clients To Use Proxy

Clients can be set up to connect to the outside world through firewall gateways by setting the following environment variables:

http_proxy
ftp_proxy
gopher_proxy
wais_proxy

to URLs of a cern_httpd running as a gateway.

Example of a Script Starting a Client

    #!/bin/sh
    http_proxy="http://www.cern.ch:911/"
    ftp_proxy="http://www.cern.ch:911/"
    gopher_proxy="http://www.cern.ch:911/"
    wais_proxy="http://www.cern.ch:911/"
    export http_proxy
    export ftp_proxy
    export gopher_proxy
    export wais_proxy
    exec Mosaic

Synonyms for these variables are:

WWW_http_GATEWAY
WWW_ftp_GATEWAY
WWW_gopher_GATEWAY
WWW_wais_GATEWAY

Setting Up cern_httpd To Run as Proxy

Server runs as a proxy if its configuration file allows URLs starting with corresponding access method to be passed. Typical proxy configuration file reads:

    pass http:*
    pass ftp:*
    pass gopher:*
    pass wais:*

Note, that cern_httpd is capable of running as a regular HTTP server at the same time; just add your normal rules after those ones.

Caching

cern_httpd running as a gateway can also perform caching of files retrieved from remote hosts. See configuration file documentation for further details.

httpd@info.cern.ch