This is a port forwarder, which is designed to forward a port on localhost to a port somewhere else (either another port on localhost, or a remote port).

I didn't want to muck around with doing any sort of system port fowarding using something like iptables. I needed a quick solution, preferably in userspace, which turned into this set of programs.

There is a high level architecture present in the doc directory. Just run python server.py config.ini to load the interface to the Wiki which holds the documentation (you must be using Python 3, preferably 3.3, to use this script). Open up 'http://localhost:8000/wiki/page/MainPage' and read from there.

The tool comes in to parts, the server and the tool, both of which have two versions, which are the transport methods (one uses DBus and the other uses Unix sockets).

I originally tried using DBus because it handles all of the marsaling and unmarshaling of data between the two processes. his worked, but not for my use case - DBus requires creating a session bus, which makes it difficult to run the server as root, and then connect to it later using sudo.

I wanted an IPC mechanism which could be used without running any other software, which is why I chose Unix sockets - they have privelige mechanisms built in place (so a user cannot change settings when the server runs as root) which were more flexible than that of DBus.

This meant that I had to write my own protocol, but that was fine. In the process, I wrote some tests in the lib directory, if you're curious what keeps the protocol implementation from failing. It seems stable enough in casual usage.

Just make sure that, whatever IPC you choose, that you use servers and tools that match.

The server is what does all the actual handling of sockets. It resides in the bin directory - just run either proxy-service-sockets or proxy-service-dbus.

It takes no command line arguments, so all you need to do is run it.

The tool is what manages the server. It can be found in the bin directory also, and is called either proxy-tool-dbus or proxy-tool-sockets.

This tool requires command line arguments. Run the tool with no arguments to find out what the required arguments are. The command set is the same, regardless of what IPC you use.

Note: do not try to forward a UDP socket onto a TCP socket!

Getting the two protocols to mesh well hasn't gone well - feel free to look at the code for the UDPServer class in lib/portforward.py if you have any ideas.

You'll find it in the lib directory.