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Running SETI through a NTLM Proxy.


Ok your company generously provides you with a nice fast PC to do your work with, and internet access! But when you come to install SETI@Home on it you find, SETI doesn't support authentication, worse still when you look into using a local proxy on your machine you find your corporate LAN uses a Micro$oft Proxy with NTLM authentication, which is a Micro$oft proprietary protocol and not widely supported! Game over? No! :o)

The solution

So your behind a proxy, it uses authentication, so you need to supply it with a valid username and password before it will honour your requests for data, this is further complicated by the fact that Micro$oft use there own authentication protocol NTLM which they don't make information on freely available, so non-Micro$oft software such as SETI@Home has difficulty supporting it. But there is a solution HTTPort allows you to tunnel through a NTLM proxy. Once you have downloaded it see you can configure it as follows.
  1. Install HTTPort
  2. On it's Proxy Tab enter the Host Name or IP address of you proxy server, the port will probably be 80.
  3. On the same tab, enter Your Username and Password, Set Bypass mode to Remote Host, and user agent to reflect you browser setup.
  4. On the Port Mapping page create a new entry for SETI.
  5. Set the local port to any unmapped port above 1024, this will be the port SETI will use to connect to HTTPort.
  6. For remote host enter 128.32.18.166 this is the IP address of the SETI work unit server.
  7. For remote port enter 80 this is the port number for HTTP.
  8. Install SETI@Home
  9. Under Settings->Proxy Server check the Connect via HTTP proxy server box
  10. enter 127.0.0.1 in the box entitled http:/
  11. Enter the port number you selected in the box entitled Port Number.
  12. make sure HTTPort is running, the button on the Proxy tab should say STOP if it says START click it!
  13. SETI@Home should now work normally!

Below is a graphic setup example.

HTTPort 3.2SN2 proxy settings. HTTPort 3.2SN2 port mapping.
SETI@Home 3 proxy server settings.


Other solutions and useful links.

HTTP-Tunnel A similar product to HTTPort.
Socks2HTTP A program that provides a SOCKS server from an HTTP server.
SocksCap32 A program that allows non-SOCKS 5 compatible programs to use SOCKS 5.

The proxomitron Doesn't support NTLM yet, but still a very nice filtering proxy!