Re: [gentoo-user] Proxy questions

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Tuesday 24 Jan 2012 17:08:43 felix@crowfix.com wrote:
> I know, in general, what proxies do -- caching, filtering, and
> bypassing firewalls.  I have even written a couple of very special
> purpose proxies.  Now I need one for work, and don't realy want to
> write another custom special purpose when it seems there must be a
> canned one which can do the job.
> 
> We have some vendors who transact business over special ports with
> custom protocols.  We pay for these connections, and we only have two
> of them, good enough for QA, but when a developer needs to test code,
> they have to drag their machine over to QA and schedule time with one
> of these connections.  What we need is a proxy which can take any
> number of connections on our side and funnel everything into one or
> two vendor connections.  I don't know enough of the proxy jargon to
> know how to describe it.  I imagine some kind of NAT.  No filtering or
> caching; firewall penetration will be taken care of elsewhere.
> 
> Any suggestions, or proxy education hints?

I'm not entirely clear of your use case scenarios and the constraints you are 
trying to address with a proxy (e.g. why the developer does not connect 
directly to the vendors port(s) to access their service? ) but I'll guess that 
you probably need a reverse proxy/load balancer arrangement - something like 
pound, portfusion, or even nginx?  BTW, did I mention apache mod_proxy?  I am 
not sure what authentication arrangements you need to access your vendors 
ports, if you have VPNs or other secure tunnels between your site and the 
vendors', but let's say I'd read up on reverse proxies as a start.

This should make the transaction transparent for your devs, they won't 
necessarily know which vendor they end up with after they hit your URL, but I 
am not sure if it will satisfactorily address the issue of scheduling time for 
a connection with your vendors at times of high demand.  Once ports or vendor 
service limitations are reached the connections will eventually become 
saturated.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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