Inferno Nettverk A/S, Oslo, Norway Monday, July 4, 2005 Inferno Nettverk is pleased to announce a new release of Dante - a free socks proxy client/server implementation for UNIX. Dante is being developed by Inferno Nettverk A/S, a consulting firm located in Oslo Research Park, Norway. Inferno Nettverk provides services related to computer security, UNIX, and program development. Please see http://www.inet.no/ for more information about our services. Dante is free software, available under a BSD-like license. Inferno Nettverk A/S also provides various commercial services related to Dante, including support, development, porting and embedding. The Dante package consists of two parts, packed into one archive. 1) The server part, supporting socks v4 and socks v5 (sans gssapi). 2) The client part, supporting socks v4, socks v5 (sans gssapi), http v1.0. In addition to standard socks authentication methods, Dante includes the following additional methods: pam and rfc931 (ident). Dante also includes an extension to the socks v4/v5 protocols which provides a more generic bind(2) functionality, similar to what non-socks programs expect. This makes it possible to run standard server applications, like e.g. ftpd, behind the Dante server. Compared to the previous release, this version brings amongst other changes the following: Client changes: Server changes: o Enabled code for shutting down idle sockd processes. o Return immediate error if username/password is wrong in the common case, rather than delaying it for later. Helps avoid the case where socks-clients cache the wrong username/password. Reworked rule-checking code a little too. o In one rare case, such as triggered in some LVS health-checker installations, a bug could make us leak descriptors. Thanks to Antonio Paulo Salgado Forster and Pete Harvey for help with debugging. o Fix a bug where server could hang while waiting for input from client during negotiation. Thanks to Robert Marcano . Generic changes: o Some additions to better preserve TCP semantics across connections. See NEWS for a more complete list. Special compatibility notes for users upgrading from the previous version of Dante: Server part: Client part: For more information, please see "http://www.inet.no/dante/".