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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (28525)	10/11/1999 12:09:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello ToySoldier, Over the weekend, I was playing around ... I think I have yet another solution to help obscure the detection of NAT on user's home networks. ;-) As I stated, I can not think of any reasonable way that an ISP would be able to detect NAT ... they might be able to do extreme analysis, but these would be extremely intensive efforts. From my analysis they would have to attempt to detect IP port usage patterns and try to align these with known NAT implementations. But this could easily be changed by a NAT vendor, and the method would prove worthless. Just in case they wanted to try doing this, I wanted to take a different track - SOCKS. BorderManager has a "complete" SOCKS 4 and 5 implementation, and I configured it this weekend for some testing ... and I'm impressed. It actually solves a couple of problems that I have been having, since I operate behind NAT. With SOCKS5, I run a SOCKS client on my workstation which creates (what appears as) a single TCP connection from my workstation to the SOCKS server out on the Internet. All of my network traffic is then "aggregated" over this single connection, through my NAT server, out to the SOCKS server. So to the ISP, they now see a single TCP connection ... which appears to be from the NAT to the SOCKS server. SOCKS even allows for encryption, however I'm not sure that Novell supports this. SOCKS also allows the use of UDP bi-directionally, so NetMeeting now works through NAT! And the cool part is that a full SOCKS client for your machine can be bought (http://www.Aventail.com $49) or had for FREE! (http://www.Hummingbird.com FREE!) The really interesting part of this, is that use of a server like this helps to further obscure my source address. To end users, all of my traffic appears to eminate from the SOCKS server IP address ... not my true address. This is again an important part of "community" and "anonomous" transactions. The SOCKS server becomes the "community" that I speak from ... and yes, they have authentication also so that I can restrict who uses my SOCKS server ... Have you worked with SOCKS in BorderManager at all? Scott C. Lemon