[Venting On]
After spending a week battling with Netscape Navigator 2.01 to get it to
function half-way decently with an Internet firewall, I've come to the
conclusion that Navigator is overtly firewall hostile / brain-damaged.
o Does PASV ftp without an option to turn PASV off
o Enabling its SOCKS support results in it SOCKifying _everything_,
even access to servers that don't need, or want, SOCKS connections (such as
internal SMTP and HTTP servers).
o It's built in support for ftp, wais, HTTP, etc., proxies is
brain-damaged - specifically if an authenticating proxy, such as for ftp,
is enabled at the firewall. To quote one of their technical notes "...the
only way to do authentication through a firewall used to be to use the HTTP
authentication mechanism." In the case of ftp, Navigator attempts to
negotiate the ftp proxy via an HTTP session. Completely confuses the ftp
proxy.
o You can't configure it with a plug-in or helper application to
handle ftp transfers - you have to live with / work around its PASV /
non-authenticating capable ftp agent.
[Venting Off]
I can only assume this is intentional behavior in order to get people to
buy Netscape's "proxy server". Has anyone ever configured and/or used one
in conjunction with a firewall? Does it really work?
Anyway, we finally got Navigator working (without SOCKS) through the
firewall, including PASV ftp.
--
Steve Engle
DHT, Inc.
sengle @
hti .
net
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