Network jail-breaking with an accomplice on the outside

Fumikazu Iseki at Tokyo University of Information Sciences has written a proxy server that you can run outside your firewall between your client and the Linden Labs servers.

The idea is that you put it on a box outside your firewall, connect to it on a permitted port (like port 80) from your client PC running Second Life, and it connects on your behalf to the various ports used by Linden Labs. That way you can use Second Life even if your network adminstrator won’t open the ports you need to connect to Second Life.

The thing is still in Beta, and doesn’t yet support voice. Also, presumably it’ll mean extra latency as traffic has to travel from your PC to the proxy server, then from the proxy server to the Linden Labs boxes, instead of straight from the PC to the servers. And the license, although friendly to non-commerical users, appears to be non-free. But it’s an interesting piece of work all the same.

The server runs on Linux. You can download it here. Be sure to check your IT security policy before you try it on someone’s network…

A related project that would be very useful if we could bring it off would be to setup a caching proxy server to save textures locally, instead of having to pull them from the Linden Labs server every time. Currently educators wanting to have a number of students run Second Life at the same time need to have an absolute monster of a network connection to avoid the kind of problems they’ve been having at the Japanese end of Pacific Rim X. Much of the traffic hogging that connection is duplicated, as all the avatars visiting the same space are downloading the same images.

Maybe if we ask Iseki-san nicely he’ll work his magic on the caching problem as well…

—UPDATE—
Looks like we can solve the caching problem with squid.