I have recently been sharing the connection of my mobile device to my laptop, when i'm out and about, through the use of an app called netshare. It provides a https proxy I believe through which it acts as a network repeater?(not sure about this part). I can access webpages and such quite easily. However, I have realised that I cannot connect to some apps. For example, I cannot use spotify. Installing some other apps like games etc also prove to fail. I have done a bit of research and found that apparently I could only surf the web with a https proxy. However, I found this to be unambiguous. Does this mean that I can only make https requests? Or is this because of https using TCP over UDP? What are the limitations and what can I do to possibly solve it?
Thanks
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I am using a third party (OS X) tool to help me process OFX financial data. It works, but I am interested in knowing what exactly is going on behind the scenes to make it work (the structure of the HTTP requests).
I setup Charles as an SSL proxy for all traffic in hopes that I could observe the requests being made by this tool, but the program runs and Charles gets nothing. No requests show up whatsoever. How is that possible? Is there something I am not understanding about how Charles or other packet sniffing tools work? What are some ways that web requests could be made that wouldn't show up in a tool like Charles?
Charles is not a packet sniffer. It's a proxy. The app initiating the connection has to "voluntarily" use the proxy for the proxy to see anything. If an app uses a high-level networking API like NSURLConnection then it will, by virtue of the frameworks, automatically pick up the system-wide proxy settings and use the proxy. If, instead, the app wrote their networking using low-level socket API, then they will not end up going through the proxy unless they specifically re-implement that functionality.
If you want to see everything, you will need a real promiscuous-mode packet sniffer, which Charles is not. Unfortunately, using a "real" packet sniffer will just show you the gibberish going over the wire for SSL connections, so that's probably not what you want either. If an app has "in-housed" its SSL implementation and is not using a properly configured system-wide proxy, sniffing its traffic unencrypted will be considerably harder (you'll probably have to use a debugger or some other runtime hooking approach.)
I have setup a windows 2003 ftp server and using chilkat to connect to this ftp inside my customized application. My application is developed in VB6 with ftp support of chilkat. The application works on different places of the city and connects to my ftp. Unable to access ftp and transfer files using the customised application, from some networks like idea netsetter / bsnl. It works perfect on other networks.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Sam
This is likely to be a firewall issue at the client end. FTP is often blocked by firewalls.
Just as well, FTP has its problems making it a less than ideal alternative. There are better options such as SFTP or FTPS but support for those is limited in Windows and you'll have to buy both server and client pieces to use one of them.
Fewer firewalls block HTTP and HTTPS though some are finicky enough to block traffic that doesn't look like Web browsing. Stiil, your odds of success go up substantially.
An obvious choice might be to use WebDAV. IIS supports WebDAV and it is pretty easy to write simple WebDAV client logic in VB6 based on one of the many HTTP components available. I'd probably use XmlHttpRequest or WinHttpRequest for that. A search ought to turn up several VB6 classes written to wrap one of them to support WebDAV client operations. You can also buy WebDAV client libraries.
Stick to using HTTPS (which means you need a server cetificate for IIS) and you won't have passwords going over the network in the clear. Even if you use HTTP you'll be no worse off than using FTP, plus it'll work through the vast majority of firewalls except those that specifically block non-browsing HTTP requests.
This could be a firewall configuration on the Client or Server. You're not going to be able to do much about the client, but for the server it may depend on whether your doing Active or Passive FTP connections.
If you are doing Active connections, make sure ports 20 and 21 are open.
If you're doing Passive connections, you may want to check out this article about configuring the PassivePortRange in Server 2003 FTP- http://support.microsoft.com/?id=555022.
Need to be able to continuously receive calls when a Chrome webpage is open. How do I do that even for users who are inside a strict enterprise network?
WebSockets? (but there's the proxy problems that doesn't know what wss:// is)
HTTP? (but will I have to poll?)
Other?
Since you included the "vLine" tag, I'll reply with some information on how our WebRTC platform will behave in an enterprise network. vline.js will use a secure WebSocket by default if the browser supports it and fall back to HTTPS long polling. As described here, the secure WebSocket may work depending on the exact proxy configuration. Feel free to test it out by using GitTogether or creating your own vLine service for testing.
How does Netnanny or k9 Web Protection setup web proxy without configuring the browsers?
How can it be done?
Using WinSock directly, or at the NDIS or hardware driver level, and
then filter at those levels, just like any firewalls soft does. NDIS being the easy way.
Download this ISO image: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=36a2630f-5d56-43b5-b996-7633f2ec14ff
it has bunch of samples and tools to help you build what you want.
After you mount or burn it on CD and install it go to this folder:
c:\WinDDK\7600.16385.1\src\network\ndis\
I think what you need is a transparent proxy that support WCCP.
Take a look at squid-cache FAQ page
And the Wikipedia entry for WCCP
With that setup you just need to do some firewall configuration and all your web traffic will be handled by the transparent proxy. And no setup will be needed on your browser.
netnanny is not a proxy. It is tied to the host machine and browser (and possibly other applications as well. It then filters all incoming and outgoing "content" from the machine/application.
Essentially Netnanny is a content-control system as against destination-control system (proxy).
Easiest way to divert all traffic to a certain site to some other address is by changing hosts file on local host
You might want to have a look at the explanation here: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/help/hookup.asp
This is how Fiddler2 achieves inserting a proxy in between most apps and the internet without modifying the apps (although lots of explanation of how-to failing the default setup). This does not answer how NetNanny/K9 etc work though, as noted above they do a little more and may be a little more intrusive.
I believe you search for BrowserHelperObjects. These little gizmos capture ALL browser communication, and as such can either remote ads from the HTML (good gizmo), or redirect every second click to a spam site (bad gizmo), or just capture every URL you type and send it home like all the WebToolBars do.
What you want to do is route all outgoing http(s) requests from your lan through a reverse proxy (like squid). This is the setup for a transparent web proxy.
There are different ways to do this, although I've only ever set it up OpenBSD and Linux; and using Squid as the reverse proxy.
At a high level you have a firewall with rules to send all externally bound http traffic to a local squid server. The Squid server is configured to:
accept all http requests
forward the requests on to the real external hosts
cache the reply
forward the reply back to the requestor on the local lan
You can then add more granular rules in Squid to control access to websites, filter content, etc.
I pretty sure you can also get this functionality in different networking gear. I bet F5 has some products that do some or all of what I described, and probably Cisco as well. There is probably other proxies out there besides Squid that you can use too.
PS. I have no idea if this is how K9 Web Protection or NetNanny works.
Squid could provide an intercept proxy for HTTP and HTTPs ports, without configuring the browsers and it also supports WCCP.
I'm trying to port a win32 application to Windows Mobile 6 / 6.1 / 6.5. It uses winhttp which doesn't appear to be available on the mobile platforms.
My initial thought was to replace it with WinInet - but I wondered if anyone had a better idea?
WinInet is actually a more appropriate HTTP client library for client nodes.
Here's some things I like about WinInet voer WinHttp:
If your client app needs to make lots of requests from the same server, WinInet will implicitly queue the requests up so as not to flood the server. (But is transparent to the client app). In other words, it respects RFC 2616 guidelines on simultaneous connections. This is great when your app is pulling down a lot of images (or files) from the same server simultanously.
Will the use the IE cache for fetching content. (Which I assume an equivalent cache exists on Mobile platforms).
Proxy server auto-detected from IE settings. Probably less of an issue with mobile since the IP network is a bit more open. But if you had to support proxy servers with WinHttp, you'd have to use other API calls to specify the server directly.
I've used Wininet and it works. But it's not ideal as its timeouts are broken. And developing a complete asynchronous design with it required a ton of code.
So instead, I'm trying libcurl.
So far though, I still haven't managed to get it compile properly and link. Porting stuff is such a pain sometimes. But I digress. ;)