Adam Zey wrote:
Tunelling arbitrary TCP packets. Similar idea to SSH port forwarding,
except tunneling over HTTP instead of SSH. A good example might be
encapsulating an IRC (or telnet, or pop3, or ssh, etc) connection inside
of an HTTP connection such that incomming IRC traffic goes over a GET to
the client, and outgoing IRC traffic goes over a POST request.
So, the traffic is bounced:
[mIRC] ---> [client.php] -----internet-----> [apache ---> server.php]
-----internet-----> [irc server]
And the same in reverse. The connection between client.php and
server.php is taking the IRC traffic and encapsulating it inside an HTTP
connection, where it is unpacked by server.php before being sent on to
the final destination. The idea is to get TCP tunneling working, once
you do that you can rely on other programs to use that TCP tunnel for
more complex things, like SOCKS.
You're trying to get a square peg through a round hole. The HTTP
protocol was not designed to do anything like this, so the standard
implementation by most web servers and PHP does not allow what you are
trying to do.
I'm curious about your 'lots of POSTs' solution. How are you keeping the
connection open on the server-side? It's certainly not possible to
maintain that connection between requests without using a process
outside the web server that maintains the connections. I've implemented
a system in the past to proxy IRC, MSN and AIM connections in this way,
but it only worked because the requests that came into PHP got passed to
this other process which held all the connections and managed the
traffic. And yes, it did generate a huge amount of traffic even when it
wasn't doing anything due to the need to poll the server for new
incoming messages.
This demonstrates a point at which you need to reconsider whether a
shared hosting environment (which I assume you're using given the
restrictions you've mentioned) is enough for your purposes. If you had a
dedicated server you could add another IP and run a custom server on it
that would be capable of doing exactly what you want. In fact there are
lots of nice free proxies that will happily sit on port 80. However,
it's worth nothing that a lot of firewalls block traffic that doesn't
look like HTTP, in which case you'll need to use SSL on port 443 to get
past those checks.
Anyways, long story (sorry) short, your square peg won't go in the round
hole without serious modification. Hope that helps.
-Stut
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