* Enrico Scholz <
enrico.scholz@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de> [2010-03-29 08:03]:
dunno; there was neither a response on the maillist nor in the bugtracker. Perhaps, proxies are such an exotic feature that nobody needs them.
The simplest users and use cases can escape the need for proxies, but
I will highlight a real need for proxy support in irssi.
① Bitlbee is a piece of middleware that typically runs on the local
machine. If you run “torsocks irssi”, the local ports are
unavailable. So you cannot simultaneously use torsocks to reach cloud
servers while having some local windows connected to Bitlbee.
② Torsocks requires trust. Torsocks does not force an app to use
Tor. It’s merely an ugly hack whereby an app incidentally uses a
standard library that has been swapped. But it’s the apps choice to do
so. An app running on Torsocks /could/ ignore the standard lib and
directly manually make network connections that bypass Tor. Not
necessarily out of malice but a design choice. Users have to inspect
the code if they want confidence that the app is using the normal
network design pattern. A proxy setting gives users confidence that
their app will use the expected network. It still requires trust, but
ignoring a user’s proxy instructions would be bluntly malicious and
users more readily trust that blatant malice is not in play than the
accidental variety.
Torsocks is hack; and it falls short in the bitlbee scenario. One hack
that works for Bitlbee users is this:
$ socat -T9999999 -s TCP4-LISTEN:12345,ignoreeof SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:libera75jm6of4wxpxt4aynol3xjmbtxgfyjpu34ss4d7r7q2v5zrpyd.onion:6697,socksport=9050,ignoreeof &
$ socat_pid=$!
$ irssi
$ kill ${socat_pid}
It’s a bit tedious to have a separate socat tunnel running for every
cloud server needed. But it works. Until a tor circuit goes down. So
suppose you have conversations going on 4 different IRC servers (thus
4 socat processes), and one of the circuits goes down? Socat is
killed. It’s extra tedious to track down which socat process needs to
be relaunched in order to reconnect. Alternatively, users can /quit
and rerun their script, but that interrupts all their chats.
It’s quite a mess. And a bit surprising that as old as irssi is, there
is no proxy capability given the nature of IRC clients.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)