Hardware Suggestions

[JPerez]

I am intrested in purchasing wingate professional and a new pc to run as a dedicated server. I believe I will have about 100-200 concurrent users. What kind of specs would you recommend on this pc to be able to handle all the users. Wingate will be used mainly as a socks 5 proxy server since I already have other machines that do dhcp, active directory, and dns.

[adrien]

I believe you could get adequate capacity for these users out of a P4 3000 1GB RAM machine.

Depends on whether you want to also scan WWW traffic by AV.

I don't know that SOCKS is your best option for access though - any particular reason why you are going with that? We recently made some changes to the SOCKS server as well related to automatically opening firewall holes for SOCKS BIND.

There are design issues with the SOCKS protocol that make for some difficulties sometimes (that's why we wrote the Winsock Redirector Server and WinGate Client).

Adrien

[JPerez]

Our current network setup has serveral vlans and is very segmented. We support 3000+ users and we are running on a mostly Microsoft environment. In order to secure the network we have blocked many ports which does not allow some programs to connect properly. We wanted to offer our users a chance to get to these ports via a proxy. We do not want to just open up all the ports requested by everyone to everyone. So we are thinking of setting up a dedicated server as a proxy server to handle these special users. It is really mostly people trying to play online games such as couter strike on steam. It seems that using a Socks 5 proxy server is one of our best options. Could you suggest a different solution?

[adrien]

Will these clients be running any particular client software to provide SOCKS access?

e.g. sockscap or AutoSocks?

Or were you going to rely on the in-built socks support of some software?

If you are going to be running client software to get this going, you should evaluate the WinGate client.

You'll probably have to manually configure it to find WinGate, but it provides a lot more information to WinGate for policy evaluation, such as the name of the running application, and it automatically handles authentication with the Windows user database (NTLM). With WinGate enterprise, you can centrally configure it, so you can centrally block apps you don't want to run on the network.

Adrien

[JPerez]

I am not sure if they will be using some other client software for SOCKS access. I tested it with sockscap and it seems to work just fine... except that wingate does not authenticate the user using sockscap. The software I initially tried did not have a built in SOCKS support, but it would be nice if it did work with other software with built in SOCKS support. Is the WinGate client free? If it is, can I request an extention on the trial? Or do I have to uninstall and reinstall the current WinGate trial?

[adrien]

Hi

Yes the WinGate Client is free. If you want your trial extended, we can do that for you no problem. Send an email to support@wingate.com with your current trial ID (you can see this if you select your current trial activation in License Management in GateKeeper).

The good thing about the WinGate client vs sockscap, is that it does NTLM authentication, which means that users authenticate to WinGate with their windows username and passwords, and they don't need to re-enter them... they just log in, and if their machine login has the right credentials, or they are part of a domain or active directory, then they should be good to go. Sockscap requires users to have alternative passwords, and is less well-integrated with the OS (i.e. you need to set up profiles for applications and launch them through sockscap).

Adrien