Dante - A free SOCKS server

Dante is a product developed by Inferno Nettverk A/S. It consists of a SOCKS server and a SOCKS client, implementing RFC 1928 and related standards. It is a flexible product that can be used to provide convenient and secure network connectivity.

Once installed, Dante can in most cases be made transparent to clients, providing functionality somewhat similar to what could be described as a non-transparent Layer 4 router. For customers interested in controlling and monitoring access in or out of their network, the Dante SOCKS server can provide several benefits, including security and TCP/IP termination (no direct contact between hosts inside and outside of the customer network), resource control (bandwidth, sessions), and logging (host information, data transfered).

The Dante SOCKS server also interoperates with many popular network applications which already have SOCKS support built in to them, such as most web-browsers, instant messaging programs, Bloomberg terminals, and many others.

Developed by Inferno Nettverk A/S, Dante is released under a BSD/CMU-type license and comes with complete source code.

Dante is used daily by Fortune 100 companies and large international organizations, both as a standard (forward) proxy server and as a reverse proxy server.

Inferno Nettverk A/S also provides various commercial services related to Dante, including support, customized installations/tuning, development, porting and embedding. For more information about commercial support, see the Dante support page.

Configuration and setup of Dante is described in the configuration pages.

Several commercial modules are available for the Dante server. For more information see the module page.

Recent news

• 2012-08-06: A report that looks at the functionality of the new code for limiting connections and connection rates, to be found in Dante version 1.4.0, has been published: Analysis of the session limit functionality in Dante version 1.3.2.4
• 2012-06-19: A pre-release of Dante version 1.4.0 is now available. This version introduces several new features in addition to bug fixes. Please see the announcement for full details.
• 2012-03-07: A performance analysis of new real-time functionality that will be available in Dante version 1.4.0 is available here: Analysis of Real-Time scheduling functionality in Dante version 1.3.2.2. (This functionality is included in the 1.4.0-pre1 release which is available now).
• 2011-08-04: Dante version 1.3.2 has been released. This is a maintenance release that primarily fixes bugs found in the previous release. The announcement lists the changes.
• 2011-07-27 We have published a report with a performance analysis of Dante 1.3.1. The document describes how Dante was configured to run in a high-traffic environment, and the resulting performance and resource requirements.
• 2011-06-21: Dante version 1.3.1, which fixes some bugs in Dante 1.3.0 has been released today. The announcement lists the changes.
• 2011-06-14: The first full version of the 1.3.x major release is now available. Dante version 1.3.0 has several new features in addition to bug fixes and performance improvements. A full overview of the changes can be found in the announcement.