Wingate 2007

[frputz]

What is up with

wingate-2007
????

Seems to be released.. one year later then announced?


We are waiting for this new version, due to more and more problems with the old proxy engine....

Can you say already a definitively realease date.

Regards

Frank

[frputz]

No answer is also a answer....

What can i think from a company did not give a answer to a normal question??? Wingate 2007 was anounced for 2007, ok.. like to have a stable version instead a buggy banana software..

We have planed to purchase a new enterprise licence version with unlimited users.. it is already in the bugdet...

Had already some trouble with wingate in the past.. but you know.. it works... mostly.. and with workarounds.. it is ok...

But again had some trouble in the past.. and sometimes.. it was terrible to get professional help from qbik staff... so we did not pay anymore for support...

And.. we got more and more problems.. with new internet sites... special systems from customer .. and so on.. sometimes sites are not displayed and so on... only small problems from the view of the admin.. but for users big problems........

I made a normal question about Wingate 2007.. it seems it is a question qbik did not like due to some problems with the current development of the new version... so no answer... i post this in the past.. it is not the way to make bussines

Qbik staff is aktive here in the forum... also to a question in the past about wingate 2007 from a other user.. no exact answer...

I am sitting here.. must told my boss what we can do.. told him Qbik will release a new version... but when.. ohh.. they did not say this.. if you sent a e-mail you got no answer.. and in the forum the give you no answer too...

Did anyone knows CCProxy from youngzsoft.. arround 80 $ for a full version.. seems to be fitting our need's... or ProxyPlus cost arround 300$ .. any experience with this...
so why should i wait longer for a Wingate 2007 ???? Any good answers...

[jasona]

Sorry this post was over looked as I posted on the 11th about the new version of WinGate "There is no concrete date as yet. As Genie mentioned the drivers are there (for vista) however they will only work with the next version of WinGate which is still in development"
http://forums.qbik.com/viewtopic.php?t=25174&highlight=

We were expecting to have a beta out alot sooner, but the devs have been constantly coming across new things that need to be done here and there. It's pretty intense for them, since this is more of a code rewrite then a simple update. The latest estimate for the beta is late February early March. ~ http://www.wingate.com/wingate-2007.php

We realise we misjudged when WinGate 7.0 was going to be ready for release, so we will be extending the protection policy of any licenses that were purchased in anticipation of the WG7 release.

As for your WinGate issues, feel free to create a new support ticket or re-open a previous one if you are still awaiting a solution, we do not charge for support so am not too sure why you say that you no longer pay for support?

You also mentioned that you sent an email and got no reply? Whom did you send the email to?

[ekkas2]

On the link http://www.wingate.com/wingate-2007.php it doesn't really say what new features will be available except for Vista and x64 support.

What I'm really interested in is Load Balancing. I understand WG6.2.2 cannot do it. Correct?

I've been using WG for about 6 years now with a Linksys RV016 router to Load Balance 4 WANs, but due to it's (Linksys's)limitations with subnets and protocol binding, some https sites doesn't work.

Will WG7 support proper load balancing with protocol binding to bind e.g port 443 traffic to one WAN, or even better, bind an source (local) ip to first available WAN so that multiple users can use https sites and still be load balanced.

Another suggestion for LB while I'm at it, is that instead of round-robin, choose which WAN to use based on load (xx second average maybe) or connection count. E.g you may have WanA@4Mbps and WanB@1Mbps, so WG sees WanA is loaded 512Mbps(12.5%) and WanB is loaded 512Mbps(50%), so use WanA. Alternatively desicion can be made on number of connections per WAN or even a weighted average of both criteria.

Please let me know, I'm in the process of replacing my WG server and Linksys router with a Mikrotik router, but if WG7 will be able to do what I want and be available in the next month or 2, then I'll wait for it.

I have simple setup(apart from load balance), i.e no mail server, no policies/users, just pure NAT/ENS with transparent proxy and port forwarding and will be happy to test WG7 but trying to sign up as beta tester, got message that my email exist in DB. Never got a reply unless it was years ago... :-0
I'll send email to support.

[adrien]

Hi

Firstly, apologies for not addressing this issue sooner.

There are several contributing factors to the delays in WinGate. As a bit of background, I'll tell you what we've been doing and why. Some of the work we have been doing will not have any obvious impact on functionality, so you may ask why do we spend time on it?

Restructuring

The first one is major restructuring. Since 1995, WinGate has been a monolithic application. This means basically a single .exe file. Any changes internally in the engine could affect many areas of operation, and this created more and more problems for development as the product evolved and increased in complexity. As time went by, the rate at which new major features were released got slower and slower and slower, and the beta periods for new major versions got longer and longer. We decided enough is enough, and so embarked mid last year on a major restructuring initiative. Initially this included only new functionality (some seen in the preview last July), but since then compelling reasons have caused us to extend this to many core existing functions, such as the user database.

Some functionality in WinGate has been stripped out into separate modules (DLLs), and new functionality has been created in new modules. The main benefits of this include:

* Greatly eases management of the development, deployment, and maintenance processes
* Isolates functional modules from each other, reducing code interdependencies and complexity.
* Creates new opportunities for additional functions and development by Qbik and 3rd parties
* Greatly increases the rate at which new features can be developed and released.
* Provides an opportunity (in refactoring code) to address other long-standing issues
* Forces complete definition of a fixed interface between client and provider code. This allows changing the implementation of a feature without affecting client code.

GUI overhaul
Again, this does not provide as much benefit to existing users as it does to new users. We get a lot of feedback from a lot of people that WinGate is difficult to understand and use. Improving usability will therefore not only benefit existing and new users, but we hope also increase conversion rates between trialling and purchasing customers.

Further, the GUI overhaul has involved the componentisation of the GUI as well as the engine. Many key functions in WinGate and GateKeeper are modules. Modules are able to seamlessly integrate into the GUI, allowing us to ship additional products which extend WinGate in a completely integrated fashion (e.g. extend the navigation in WinGate, provide GUI for new functionaliy, extend key dialogs, menus etc).

New HTTP proxy with new filtering interface

Our research indicates that the single most important functionality users require of WinGate is HTTP proxying and access control.

The current HTTP proxy in WinGate 6.2.2 is derived from an HTTP/1.0 proxy originally developed in 1996. Since then, several features have been integrated, including support for web serving, CGI, FTP browsing with data scanning, content filtering, chunking, persistent connections, and HTTP auth (including NTLM). Addition of all these features over time left the HTTP proxy structure in a less than ideal state for maintenance, and supporting certain problem issues became increasingly difficult.

Furthermore the filtering interface (with dripfeeding etc) was not extensible enough to support certain types of filter functionality.

The new proxy and new filtering API allow much more flexibility for filter components. In fact HTTP caching is now provided by a filter component (which opens possibilities of options for cache provision, such as shared caches, and advanced cache features). Filters have the ability to do things like altering requests, or modifying responses or serving responses etc, which means it's now possible to write HTTP filters such as mod_rewrite, compression, access control, content control etc.

The restructuring of the core HTTP proxy enabled us to provide better performance also for basic proxying, better support for HTTP/1.1 extensions, and provide more capabilities to the new policy framework.

New Policy Framework

The new policy framework is not like anything you will have seen before. Even in the preview, which showed an early prototype of it, you could start to see its power.

Traditionally policy has been an access control issue. You would set up policy to either allow something or block it.

We don't view policy as simply access control. A real world policy covers any potentially desirable response to a situation (event), not just allow or deny. I always take the example of a child going to a parent and asking for an apple. In a conventional style policy, the possible responses are yes or no - that's it. In the real world however, you might want to offer an alternative (like say a banana) or take some other action (put the child in time out for asking for an apple 10 times in 10 minutes). Restricting policy outcomes to an arbitrary set of yes or no / allow or deny is an arbitrary restriction traditionally chosen to simplify software. We've broken that restriction - we believe enabling sophistication in policy without sacrificing simplicity.

Policy can therefore be used not just for access control, but also to conditionally modify request parameters, as well as perform additional auxiliary actions. The structure of a policy overall is a sequence of decisions used to arrive at any number of conclusions / results. The result can be allow or deny, but can also be redirect, perform other additional tasks, or allow and set other additional conditional restrictions.

For the example of load-balancing, it's possible to set session variables per request in policy. Some of the many available session variables are those relating to how it will connect down-stream, such as the connection method (through a proxy or directly), and which gateway / internet connection it will use. So, it's now possible to write a WinGate policy to specify upstream gateway (connection to use) on a per-request basis considering any available data about the request.

This means for example you can use policy to create real policies such as:

* Requests from certain client IPs go through certain gateways
* Requests from certain user accounts go through certain gateways
* Requests at certain times go through certain gateways
* Requests for certain sites go through certain gateways
* any combination of the above and more.

What's more, the mappings for say URL to gateway, or username per URL per gateway (or whatever combination you like), can be stored in an ODBC-compatible database. ODBC-compatible databases have the benefits of being able to be shared amongst multiple WinGate services or even multiple WinGates in a cluster, and be accessed and managed by external applications (such as a website for administration).


Anyway, I'm only covering some of the new features (there are more), and only giving these as an indication of what we've been doing so that one can see that

a) Qbik is fully commited to the development of WinGate, and is aggressively developing new technologies for it.
b) we haven't been sitting on our thumbs.

Of course we apologise for how long it has taken to get to where we are, and there is still a way to go before we can release what we have. It's pretty tough having such exciting features and them not being in a state to show off to customers.

On that note, if there are customers that are willing to take a look at what we have (pre-beta), we'd love some feedback on the direction.

The key thing you're interested in is when though. At the moment our best-estimate for release of a beta is still 6 - 8 weeks out from now.

We realise some customers have been purchasing renewals of version protection, and we have announced before our intention to ensure this money is not wasted. The current plan is to extend version protection for anyone who has ever purchased a renewal to cover them until at least the next version is released. We'll be sending emails out to affected customers within the next couple of days. In the meantime, if you have previously paid to renew version protection, and that protection is about to expire, don't renew it, we'll be extending it for you.

regards

Adrien