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3.3 Access controls

Access to the proxy may be restricted in various ways. In addition to the "standard" methods (tcp wrappers, kernel firewalling rules) various restrictions are built into Tircproxy itself.

Quiz mode requires a password from the user, before any data can be sent from the client to the server. The password can be either the user's local Unix password, or one read from a user-defined file. The reason for calling this "quiz mode" is that the password mechanism can be configured to supply the user with a random question from a text file. This is meant to hinder [clone] bots from using the proxy, while allowing unlimited access to entities smart enough to answer the questions (real people).

The files /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny are used on many Unix systems to control access to various services. Tircproxy can also make use of these files, to control both access to the proxy itself and provide finer grained control over which internal and which external hosts may initiate DCC connections, and to dynamically add filenames to the mangling list.

If the administrator so chooses, features such as DCC support may be disabled either at run-time or compile time.


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