Next Previous Contents

4.3 Activating the proxy

To see if the installation succeeded, and to view a summary of the arguments and options understood by the proxy, give the command:

tircproxy -h

If your terminal window is too small to display all the output at once, try this:

tircproxy -h 2>&1 | more

The listed options and other configuration issues will be discussed in the following sections, but performing a quick test right away is very simple - the most important thing is to disable all the features you haven't configured yet. Something like this should work:

tircproxy -d9 -s 7666 -MILRH irc.undernet.org 6667

Here, the capitalized command line options are disabling most of the features of the proxy. Test the proxy by pointing your IRC client at port 7666 of the host running Tircproxy. DCC SEND and DCC CHAT should work, and you should see the proxy output debugging messages as it detects and handles the requests. Cancel the program by hitting CTRL-C.

Standalone operation

The above example is typical for standalone operation of the proxy: just specify the options you wish to use on the command line, or within a startup script.

When in standalone mode, the -s port option is mandatory - it tells the proxy to run as a server on the named port. Any port number should do, but in this document most examples use port 7666. Without this option the proxy assumes it's being run from inetd

Note that without the -d9 flag (debug level 9), the proxy will put itself in the background.

Inetd operation

Configuring Tircproxy to run from inetd is slightly more complicated, but can be very conveniant when offering dedicated access to multiple servers.

Assuming Tircproxy is installed as /usr/local/sbin/tircproxy, add lines like the following to /etc/inetd.conf, one for each server you wish to grant access to.

7666   stream  tcp     nowait    root  
  /usr/local/sbin/tircproxy tircproxy <options> irc.undernet.org 6667
7667   stream  tcp     nowait    root  
  /usr/local/sbin/tircproxy tircproxy <options> irc.som.ewh.ere.com 6667
Notes: The above example should be two lines, not four. The lines were split to make them more legible. The syntax described here applies to the inetd distributed with the Linux Netket version 0.9. The correct syntax for your operating system may be somewhat different.

The numbers in the first column are the port numbers used by each proxy. Thus connecting to proxyhost:7666 will give access to irc.undernet.org, but connecting to proxyhost:7667 will connect you to irc.som.ewh.ere.com. These numbers are completely arbitrary - choose any numbers you like.

Replace <options> with the options you are really going to use with the proxy (read on for details). Note that the -L, -s are not applicable when running the proxy from inetd.

Experienced admins will note that I do not recommend wrapping Tircproxy inside TCP wrappers. The reason for this is that Tircproxy has built-in support for the TCP wrapper configuration files (/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny) on many systems, including Linux. The build sequence tells you if your system has this feature (alternately, if you run Tircproxy with no arguments it will print a list of options and flags - if -H is on the list then your version of Tircproxy includes TCP wrapper compatibility).

Transparent mode does not seem to work when the proxy runs from inetd. Solutions are welcome.


Next Previous Contents