NAME
Net::HTTPTunnel - Create sockets that are tunnels through an HTTP 1.1 proxy
SYNOPSIS
This is a module that creates sockets that are tunnels through an HTTP 1.1 proxy that supports the SSL CONNECT method. For more information on this method, see "Tunneling TCP based protocols through Web proxy servers" by Ari Luotonen.
use Net::HTTPTunnel;
$ht = Net::HTTPTunnel->new( 'proxy-host' => some.host.com
'proxy-port' => 80
'remote-host' => other.host.com
'remote-port' => 443 );If successful, $ht will be a socket that acts as if it is connected directly to remote-host:remote-port because all bits will be routed untouched through the proxy.
The Net::HTTPTunnel constructor returns undef on an error.
NOTES
Most proxies limit CONNECT tunnels to those which have either 443 or 563 as the destination port. If you are experiencing errors and are trying to connect to a port other than one of those two, it is likely you are running into such a problem. The only way around this (assuming you cannot control the proxy settings) is to set up a listener on the remote machine that you can then connect to any port through.
Unfortunately, this tunneling method only works for tcp connections. There is no equivalent way of doing UDP connections. However, with a bit of ingenuity such a scheme can certainly be devised---imagine again the scenario of a TCP listener on the other end of the tunnel. One could wrap the UDP packets in TCP, transport them through the tunnel, and unwrap them at the other end with very little trouble.
More information on the HTTP protocol and tunneling can be found in the Luotonen paper referenced above, as well as in RFCs 1945 and 2068.
DESCRIPTION
The only member function in Net::HTTPTunnel not inherited from IO::Socket::INET is the constructor new(). New takes the following name-value pairs of arguments:
'remote-host' => 'some.host.com' [required] The system to which you want the tunnel to connect.
'remote-port' => 563 [required] The port on that system. See note above about port number selection.
'proxy-host' => 'some.host.com' [required] The proxy through which this connection will be made.
'proxy-port' => 80 [required] The port on the proxy to which a connection should be made.
'http-ver' => '1.1' [optional; default is 1.0] The version of HTTP reported in the CONNECT request. There is no reason to change this unless the proxy requires a different version.
'proxy-user' => 'foo' [optional] The username to use for proxy authentication, if required.
'proxy-pass' => 'bar' [optional] The password for proxy authentication, if required.
'user-agent' => 'baz' [optional] The user-agent string to pass along to the HTTP proxy. If not specified, it will not be sent. If you are worried about being spotted as an abberation in the server logs, perhaps it is better to set this to something fairly tame like "Mozilla/4.0".
If the connection is successful, a socket will be returned. On error, undef is returned instead.
EXAMPLES
See SYNOPSIS, above.
SEE ALSO
RFC 1945 --- "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0"
RFC 2068 --- "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1"
"Tunneling TCP based protocols through Web proxy servers" --- Ari Luotonen.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2001 Riad Wahby <rsw@mit.edu> All rights reserved This program is free software. You may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
HISTORY
0.1 Initial Release
0.2 Fixed two bugs, one which included an additional carriage return with proxy authorization, and one which prevented the http-ver option from being recognized.
0.3 Fixed the capitalization of the "Proxy-Authorization" header in case a fascist proxy did case-sensitive header matching. Also, fixed some mistakes in which \n\r was sent instead of \r\n.
0.4 Fixed a bug that would cause an instance of the module to assume success on all subsequent connections once it had gotten its first successful connection.
0.5 Changed the success test regexp so that "200 OK" is accepted as a successful reply from the proxy, since some report this instead of "200 Connection established". Thanks to JoNO for pointing out this discrepancy.
0.51 D'oh. Broken regexp.