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.

Inferno Nettverk A/S provides commercial services related to Dante, including 24/7 phone support, customized installations/tuning, development, porting and embedding. For more information about support, please see the Dante support page.

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 transferred).

The Dante SOCKS server 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.

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.

Dante Development Roadmap

Current development roadmap for Dante (updated August 2024).

Dante 1.4.x

No outstanding security patches for 1.4.3.

Dante 1.5.x

Dante 1.5.0 development has finished and is undergoing testing. Planned release date: Q4 2024

Confirmed major changes:

• Improved server-chaining scalability.
• Expanded network monitoring functionality.
• Client IPv6 support.

Recent news

• 2021-04-30: Dante 1.4.3 is now available. This is a maintenance release with various bug fixes and improvements to the LDAP module. Please see the announcement for full details.
• 2017-11-08: A page describing how to deploy Dante in fault-tolerant and load-balanced configurations has been added to the documentation for Dante.
• 2017-02-06: Dante 1.4.2 is now available. This is a maintenance release with various bug fixes and no new server features. Please see the announcement for full details.
• 2015-04-23: Article with analysis of Dante process with runtime of 326 days in production environment posted to blog section.
• 2015-03-11: A page describing how to stress test and estimate the capacity of a Dante server has been added to the documentation for Dante.
• 2014-09-03: Dante 1.4.1 has been released. This version contains various platform specific bug fixes and improves IPV6 support. Please see the announcement for full details.
• 2014-05-17: A (very) detailed performance analysis report (Inferno Technical Report 4) looking at the performance of Dante 1.4.0 in a production environment is now available for download.
• 2013-11-18: The full Dante version 1.4.0 is now available. This version introduces several new features and many bug fixes. Please see the announcement and the configuration upgrade page for full details. This version is also available in prebuilt binary format for some platforms and can be downloaded from the SSL protected binary download page.
• 2013-08-02: The second 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.
• 2012-08-06: 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.

Advisories

• 2005-01-28: A reliability problem was reported that might affect some configurations of Dante, up to and including version 1.1.14. See the advisory for details.