Proxy-like sevices configured by unprivileged users.

[chb]

Hello.

I have an ftp server ("Source") that I operate on my campus that's fairly widely used, but accessing it while I'm away from school is pretty slow or difficult because (A) Source has a capped upload speed or (B) I must first access another machine ("Intermediary") with uncapped speeds and then login from that machine to Source, transfer files from Source to Intermediary then finally to me ("Me").

Ideally, I'd like to configure a proxy, or something similar, on Intermediary so I could point my ftp client to it and access Source transparently. Now, I'd have to do some real bowing and scraping to get admin rights on Intermediary, and I doubt anyone else would set this up for me, so I was hoping I could configure it so that some high port is used by the proxy-like service run as a user, that would allow me to configure it without admin rights.

So:

Requests:
Me --> Intermediary:<highport> --> Intermediary:<someport> --> Source

Data:
Source --> Intermediary:<highport> --> Intermediary:<highport> --> Me

I have user rights on Intermediary so I can, once having logged on, connect using ftp to Source, as I have been doing.

I was hoping there was some way to automate this and make it transparent.

Many, many thanks.

chb

P.S. And since I've asked for so much, user authentication would be great too, but since so few people will be using this, I don't think it's important.
_________________
I had a waterproof pen. The ocean was very calm. The king wanted bigger waves. So I drew huge waves on the ocean. The ships didn't understand.

[chb]

The cgi-proxy package by James Marshall I found very useful. By default it's not transparent, but still very easy. With some minor perl-hacking, It can be made quite transparent.

I hightly recommend it.

http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
_________________
I had a waterproof pen. The ocean was very calm. The king wanted bigger waves. So I drew huge waves on the ocean. The ships didn't understand.