Winsock with Proxies

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  15 years ago

  by cgarcia

  Carlos Garcia

  , United States

  Joined 15 years ago

  I'm creating an email/community application for my school so that teachers can communicate over emails and instant messages and what not.

  I have the server and the client almost fully completed but the problem is that the server is being hosted on a server machine remotely (here at my house) and machines that are behind proxies at school cannot reach my server via TCP or UDP.
  I was wondering how I could connect to my server from a machine at school using a proxy with the Winsock control?
  

  Any and all help is welcomed.

  Thank you!

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• • Reply

  15 years ago

  by chrisdickson

  Chris Dickson

  Woking, England, United Kingdom

  Joined 15 years ago

  That very much depends on how your school has it's firewall set up. If you are running through a non-well-known port number, arbitrarily lets assume 2000, then it is unlikely that the firewall will allow outbound connections for security reasons.
  The most common proxy is the web proxy, but, to use that, your application would need to communicate via HTTP on port 80 - this is why SOAP is becomming so popular as the communications transport for Web Services i.e. it is already firewall friendly.
  Your solution might be to speak to your Network Admin nicely and have the port unblocked. This would be the easiest route for you in terms of not changing your code. You might also want to speak to them about the possibility of using the SOCKS proxy, but I don't know how common SOCKS proxying is these days. I haven't looked after a proxy since the days of Poxy Server 2.0.
  I would suggest that you seriously consider looking at using HTTP based architecture though, if not now then for the next version of your application. Also, for you personally, because it would be great knowledge to have a grasp of.
  
  
  
  
  

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