New user clarification

[Juli Mallett]

Hi Peder,

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 10:00, Peder <peder at networkoblivion.com> wrote:
> 1.  What is the significance of making one side server and one client?
> There is nothing in the config that specifies server or client, so is it
> just a naming convention for the examples?

It's only a matter of what encoding is used on the incoming connection
and what encoding is used on the outgoing connection.  In the case of
proxying a connection, the "client" side is where the client connects
and then the server is where the remote system makes an outgoing
connection to another server.  Let's call the two WANProxy instances
cproxy and sproxy.  So the cproxy is the one that accepts the
connection from the client and then it connects to the sproxy and the
sproxy makes the connection between theserver.

The connection between the client and the cproxy obviously needs to
not be encoded in any form, the client expects just to get whatever
the server sent.  Likewise, the connection between the sproxy and the
server needs to be unencoded.  The connection between the cproxy and
the sproxy needs to be encoded.

> 2.  When I have both ends started and pointing to each other, will it
> automatically connect to the other end?  Or do I have to send traffic to get
> it to start a connection?  I don't see any debug info other than " Starting
> event system."  I don't seeing anything like "connected to host...".

Connections between proxies are created on-demand, one per connection.
 There is no connection pool or multiplexing at present.

> 3.  In the socks example on the website, are the clients connecting to the
> server, or the client portion?  I have users that I want to connect to A and
> then have it use wanproxy to connect to B and B goes out to the servers that
> the users are trying to access.  I tried a setup and can't get it to work.

Continuing with the example names above, the sproxy would run the
SOCKS proxy server.  The cproxy would have no idea the traffic it was
tunneling was for a SOCKS proxy.  So you would have the client connect
to, for example, cproxy:1080, which would then connect to sproxy:3200
and sproxy would connect to sproxy:1080 and then sproxy would connect
to the destination host from there.  The connections from cproxy:1080
to sproxy:3200 and from sproxy:3200 to sproxy:1080 are just plain
proxies, not SOCKS proxies.  Listening on port 1080 on sproxy is a
SOCKS proxy.

I hope that's helpful.  Please respond on the list if you have any
further questions.  Sorry for the delay in answering your mail, I've
been completely swamped at work.

Thanks,
Juli.