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nylon

195 words by attila written on 2013-08-22, last edit: 2013-08-22, tags: open-source, socks ⋔ Previous post: RUSSIA Suggests that WAR May Be Necessary To Stop MONSANTO | The Liberty Beacon ⋔ Next post: Encryption is less secure than we thought - MIT News Office

nylon.

I needed a simple SOCKS proxy for work. I found nylon in my OpenBSD machine's ports tree and immediately liked its simplicity. Unfortunately I needed a socks server under Linux (Ubuntu, feh) and nylon doesn't seem to have a debian package...

At first I tried installing whatever piece of crap socks server was in debian packages for Ubuntu but it is just miserable. Insufferably bad documentation, a maze of idiotic configuration files... typical Linux shite. Because Nylon's pedigree is pretty good (monkey.org) and because the author was clueful enough to base it on libevent (also from a monkey.org alumni, Niles Provos - I've used libevent heavily myself) I figured "what the hell, let's try building it from source".

I know, I'm a dinosaur, but I was also right. All I had to do was install the libevent debian package (sudo apt-get install libevent-dev) and do the usual ./configure && make && make install dance and voila nylon was installed and worked exactly like it does under BSD Unix.

I was amazed. Is it sad that I was amazed? Yes, it's sad, but still: amazed.