Interview Questions

How do I make gopher, archie, and other services work through my firewall?

Java Security,Windows code security, Windows Server 2003 Security,Internet Explorer 7 Security and Internet Firewalls questions and answers


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How do I make gopher, archie, and other services work through my firewall?

The majority of firewall administrators choose to support gopher and archie through web proxies, instead of directly. Proxies such as the firewall toolkit's http-gw convert gopher/gopher+ queries into HTML and vice versa. For supporting archie and other queries, many sites rely on Internet-based Web-to-archie servers, such as ArchiePlex. The Web's tendency to make everything on the Internet look like a web service is both a blessing and a curse.

There are many new services constantly cropping up. Often they are misdesigned or are not designed with security in mind, and their designers will cheerfully tell you if you want to use them you need to let port xxx through your router. Unfortunately, not everyone can do that, and so a number of interesting new toys are difficult to use for people behind firewalls. Things like RealAudio, which require direct UDP access, are particularly egregious examples. The thing to bear in mind if you find yourself faced with one of these problems is to find out as much as you can about the security risks that the service may present, before you just allow it through. It's quite possible the service has no security implications. It's equally possible that it has undiscovered holes you could drive a truck through.

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