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4.1 What do you need?

Depending on what you are using Tircproxy for, some of the proxies features will be useful to you, and some won't. Typical scenarios are described in the next four sections, along with references to the relevant sections and command line examples.

Internet service providers

An ISP using Tircproxy to give firewalled users access to IRC, will probably use most of the features available:

Sample command line:

tircproxy -s port -b internal address

(The above is a real-life example, from an ISP with several thousand users.)

An IRC anonymizer

It has been a tradition online to offer people anonymous access to various services, such as email and usenet. Tircproxy can be used to grant anonymous access to IRC, by using the following features:

Sample command line:

tircproxy -a -r proxy uid -s port -b internal address -q quiz file irc server port

Home networks

Home users with small networks (many machines) and a (single) dial-up connection to the Internet may want to use Tircproxy to give the indirectly connected machines access to IRC. In such situations Tircproxy would be installed on the machine with direct access to the net, which is commonly a Linux box with IP masquerading or other firewalling facilities enabled, and the other machines would use it box as their "default router" to the Internet.

A minimal configuration might use the following features:

Sample command line:

tircproxy -HID -s port -b internal address

Alternately, dedicated (non-transparant) mode could be used on operating systems which don't implement IP masquerading or IPF:

tircproxy -HID -s port -b internal address irc server port

Mobile users

Mobile users, who connect to the internet from many different locations (work, home, school, friends' homes, ...) often want a persistant IRC identity, which isn't dependant on where they are actually connecting from. This can be achieved in many ways, one of which involves using Tircproxy as a "bouncer".

The following features would be used by a bouncer:

Sample command line:

tircproxy -HIDL -s port -q quiz file irc server port

There are other programs which specialize as bouncers, which have different features from those offered by Tircproxy. Two of them are bnc and muh. People who want to have the features of two or more of these programs at once can quite easily daisy-chain them together, with no problems other than a slight increase in latency. The order may matter a bit though, as mentioned in the mIRC DCC kludge section.


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