Skip to content

Python implementation of the PageKite remote front-end protocols.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

marcellmars/PyPagekite

 
 

Repository files navigation

pagekite.py

This is the Python implementation of the pageKite remote web front-end protocol. It implements a tunneled reverse proxy, allowing you to run an HTTP or HTTPS server on a machine without direct connectivity to the Internet.

Try ./pagekite.py --help for instructions (or read the source).

Front-end service is available at http://pagekite.net/, or you can run your own. For a more general discussion of what pageKite is and how it works, check out http://pagekite.net/support/intro/.

1. Table of contents

  1. Table of contents
  2. Requirements
  3. Running the back-end, using the service
  4. Running the back-end, using a custom front-end
  5. Running your own front-end
  6. The HTTP console
  7. Coexisting front-ends and other HTTP servers
  8. Configuring DNS
  9. Connecting over Socks or Tor
  10. Raw backends (SSH-after-HTTP and HTTP CONNECT)
  11. SSL/TLS back-ends, endpoints and SNI
  12. Unix/Linux systems integration
  13. Saving your configuration
  14. A word about security and logs
  15. Limitations and caveats
  16. Credits and licence

2. Requirements

Pagekite.py requires Python 2.x, version 2.2 or later.

Pagekite.py does not at the moment include a useful web server, so in order to do anything interesting with it, you you will need an HTTP and/or HTTPS server as well. Which web-server you prefer is up to you and depends on your goals, but any server should work.

In order for pagekite.py to terminate SSL connections or encrypt your HTTP Console, you will need openssl and either python 2.6+ or the pyOpenSSL module. These are NOT required if you just want to route HTTPS requests.

If you need to use Socks or Tor to connect to the Internet, you will also need a copy of SocksiPy: http://code.google.com/p/socksipy-branch/.

You can download pagekite.py from http://pagekite.net/downloads/.

[ up ]

3. Running the back-end, using the service

The most common use of pagekite.py, is to make a web server visible to the outside world. Assuming you are using the pageKite.net service and your web server runs on port 80, a command like this should get you up and running:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET

Replace YOURNAME with your pageKite domain name (for example something.pagekite.me) and SECRET with the shared secret displayed on your account page.

You can add multiple backend specifications, one for each name and protocol you wish to expose. Here is an example running two websites, one of which is available using three protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and WebSocket.

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET \
  --backend=https:YOURNAME:localhost:443:SECRET \
  --backend=websocket:YOURNAME:localhost:8080:SECRET \
  --backend=http:OTHERNAME:localhost:8080:SECRET

Alternately, if you want to run different HTTP back-ends on different ports for the same domain name, you can include port numbers in your backend specs:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --backend=http/80:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET \
  --backend=http/8080:YOURNAME:localhost:8080:SECRET

Note that this really only works for HTTP. Also, which ports are actually available depends on the front-end, and the protocol must still be one supported by pageKite (HTTP, HTTPS or WebSocket).

[ up ]

4. Running the back-end, using a custom front-end

If you prefer to run your own front-ends, you will need to follow the instructions in this section on your back-ends, and the instructions in the next section on your front-end.

When running your own front-end, you need to tell pagekite.py where it is, using the --frontend argument:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --frontend=HOST:PORT \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:YOURSECRET

Replace HOST with the DNS name or IP address of your front-end, and PORT with one of the ports it listens for connections on. If your front-end supports TLS-encrypted tunnels, add the --fe_certname=HOST argument as well.

[ up ]

5. Running your own front-end

To configure pagekite.py as a front-end server, you will need to have a server with a publicly visible IP address, and you will need to configure DNS correctly, as discussed below.

Assuming you are not already running a web server on that machine, the optimal configuration is to run pagekite.py so it listens on a few ports (80 and 443 at least), like so:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --isfrontend \
  --ports=80,443 --protos=http,https,websocket \
  --domain=http,https:YOURNAME:YOURSECRET

In this case, YOURNAME must be a DNS name which points to the IP of the front-end server (either an A or CNAME record), and YOURSECRET is a shared secret of your choosing - it has to match on the back-end, or the connection will be rejected.

Perceptive readers will have noticed a few problems with this though. One, is that you are running pagekite.py as root, which is generally frowned upon by those concerned with security. Another, is you have only enabled a single back-end, which is a bit limited.

The second problem is easily addressed, as the --domain parameter will accept wild-cards, and of course you can have as many --domain parameters as you like. So something like this might make sense:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --isfrontend \
  --ports=80,443,8080 --protos=http,https,websocket \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:*.YOURDOMAIN.COM:YOURSECRET \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:*.YOUROTHERDOMAIN.NET:YOUROTHERSECRET

Unfortunately, root permissions are required in order to bind ports 80 and 443, but it is possible to instruct pagekite.py to drop all privileges as soon as possible, like so:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --isfrontend \
  --runas=nobody:nogroup \
  --ports=80,443,8080 --protos=http,https,websocket \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:YOURNAME:YOURSECRET

This assumes the nobody user and nogroup group exist on your system. Replace with other values as necessary. See the section on Unix/Linux systems integration for more useful flags for running a production pagekite.py.

[ up ]

6. The HTTP console

Scanning the log output from pagekite.py is not exactly a user-friendly experience. A nicer way to see what the program is up to, is to enable the HTTP console, using the --httpd=HOST:PORT argument.

This will make pagekite.py run a web server of it's own on the named address and port (we recommend 127.0.0.1:2223), which you can visit with any web browser to see which tunnels are active, browse and filter the logs and other nice things like that. If you want to expose a back-end's console to the wider Internet, that is possible too (just add a --backend line for it), but in that case it is probably a good idea to use --httppass to set a password.

An example:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --httpd=127.0.0.1:2223 \
  --httppass=YOURPASSWORD \
  --backend=http:CONSOLENAME:localhost:2223:SECRET \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET

This should make the console visible both on http://localhost:2223/ and http://CONSOLENAME/. When it prompts for a username and password, type in whatever username you like, and the password given on the command-line.

Enabling SSL on the HTTP console

If you have the OpenSSL (pyOpenSSL or python 2.6+), you can increase the security of your HTTP console even further by creating a self-signed SSL certificate and enabling it using the --pemfile option:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --httpd=127.0.0.1:2223 \
  --httppass=YOURPASSWORD \
  --pemfile=cert.pem \
  ...

To generate a self-signed certificate:

openssl req -new -x509 \
  -keyout cert.pem -out cert.pem \
  -days 365 -nodes

Note that your browser will complain when you first visit the console and you will have to add a security exception in order to access the page.

[ up ]

7. Coexisting front-ends and other HTTP servers

What to do if you already have a web server running on the machine you want to use as a pageKite front-end? Generally only one process can run on a given IP:PORT pair, which is why this poses a problem.

The simplest solution, is to get another IP address for the machine, and use one for pagekite.py, and the other for your web-server. In that case you would add the --host=IP argument to your pagekite.py configuration.

If, however, you have to share a single IP, things get slightly more complicated. Either the web-server will have to forward connections to pagekite.py, or the other way around.

pagekite.py on port 80 (recommended)

As of pagekite.py 0.3.6, it is possible for front-ends to have direct local back-ends, so just letting pagekite.py have port 80 (and 443) is the simplest way to get the two to coexist:

  1. Move your old web-server to another port (such as 8080)
  2. Configure pagekite.py as a front-end on port 80
  3. Add --backend specifications for your old web-server.

As of 0.3.14, you can make pagekite.py use a local back-end as a catch-all for any unrecongized domains, by using the special hostname "unknown" in the --backend line (remember to specify a protocol).

For example:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --isfrontend \
  --runas=nobody:nogroup \
  --ports=80,443 --protos=http,https,websocket \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:YOURNAME:YOURSECRET \
  --backend=http,websocket:OLDNAME:localhost:8080: \
  --backend=https:OLDNAME:localhost:8443: \
  --backend=https:unknown:localhost:8090:

Note that no password is required for configuring local back-ends.

Another HTTP server on port 80

The other option, assuming your web-server supports proxying, is to configure it to proxy requests for your pageKite domains to pagekite.py, and run pagekite.py on an alternate port. How this is done depends on your HTTP server software, but Apache and lighttpd at least are both capable of forwarding requests to alternate ports.

This is likely to work in many cases for standard HTTP traffic, but very unlikely to work for HTTPS.

Warning: If you have more than one domain behind pageKite, it is of critical importance that the HTTP server not re-use the same proxy connection for multiple requests. For performance and compatibility reasons, pagekite.py does not currently continue parsing the HTTP/1.1 request stream once it has chosen a back-end: it blindly forwards packets back and forth. This means that if the web server proxy code sends a request for a.foo.com first, and then requests b.foo.com over the same connection, the second request will be routed to the wrong back-end.

Unfortunately, this means putting pagekite.py behind a high-performance load-balancer may cause unpredictable (and quite undesirable) results: Varnish at least is known to cause problems in this configuration.

Please send reports of success (or failure) configuring pagekite.py behind another HTTP server, proxy or load-balancer to our Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/pagekite-discuss.

[ up ]

8. Configuring DNS

In order for your pageKite websites to be visible to the wider Internet, you will have to make sure DNS records for them are properly configured.

If you are using the service, this is handled automatically by the pageKite.net dynamic DNS service, but if you are running your own front-end, then you may need to take some additional steps.

Static DNS configuration

Generally if you have a single fixed front-end, you can simply use a static DNS entry, either an A record or a CNAME, linking your site's domain name to the IP address of the machine running the front-end.

So, if the front-end's name is foo.com with the IP address 1.2.3.4, and your website is blah.foo.com, then you would need to configure the DNS record for blah.foo.com as a CNAME to foo.com or an A record to 1.2.3.4.

This is the same kind of configuration as if your front-end were a normal web host.

Alternately, it might be useful to set up a wildcard DNS record for the domain foo.com, directing all unspecified names to your front-end. That, combined with the wildcard --domain argument described above, will give you the flexibility to trivially create as many pageKite websites as you like, just by changing arguments to the back-end.

Dynamic DNS configuration

This all gets a bit more complicated if you are running multiple front-ends, and letting the back-end choose between them based on ping times (this is the --default behavior does when using the pageKite service).

First of all, the back-end will need a way to receive the list of available front-ends. Secondly, the back-end will need to be able to dynamically update the DNS records for the sites it is connecting.

The list of front-ends should be provided to pagekite.py as a DNS name with multiple A records. As an example, the default for the pageKite service, is the name frontends.b5p.us:

$ host frontends.b5p.us
frontends.b5p.us has address 69.164.211.158
frontends.b5p.us has address 93.95.226.149
frontends.b5p.us has address 178.79.140.143
...

When started up with a --frontends argument (note the trailing s), pagekite.py will measure the distance of each of these IP addresses and pick the one closest. (It will also perform DNS lookups on its own name and connect to any old back-ends as well, to guarantee reachability while the old DNS records expire.)

Pagekite.py has built-in support for most of the common dynamic DNS providers, which can be accessed via. the --dyndns flag. Assuming you were using dyndns.org, running the back-end like this might work in that case:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --frontends=1:YOUR.FRONTENDS.COM:443 \
  --dyndns=USER:PASS@dyndns.org \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME.dyndns.org:localhost:80:YOURSECRET

Instead of dyndns.org above, pagekite.py also has built-in support for no-ip.com and of course pagekite.net. Other providers can be used by providing a full HTTP or HTTPS URL, with the following python formatting tokens in the appropriate places:

%(ip)s - will be replaced by your new front-end IP address
%(domain)s - will be replaced by your domain name

This example argument manually implements no-ip.com support (split between lines for readability):

--dyndns='https://USER:PASS@dynupdate.no-ip.com/nic/update?
hostname=%(domain)s&myip=%(ip)s'

[ up ]

9. Connecting over Socks or Tor

If you want to run pagekite.py from behind a restrictive firewall which does not even allow outgoing connections, you might be able to work around the problem by using a Socks proxy.

Alternately, if you are concerned about anonymity and want to hide your IP even from the person running the front-end, you might want to connect using the Tor network.

For these situations, you can use the --torify or --socksify arguments, like so:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --socksify=SOCKSHOST:PORT \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:YOURSECRET

In the case of Tor, replace --socksify with --torify and (probably) connect to localhost, on port 9050.

With --torify, some behavior is modified slightly in order to avoid leaking information about which domains you are hosting through DNS side channels.

Note: This requires SocksiPy: http://code.google.com/p/socksipy-branch/

[ up ]

10. Raw backends (SSH-after-HTTP and HTTP CONNECT)

Pagekite.py version 0.3.7 adds the "raw" protocol, which allows you to bind a back-end to a raw port. This may be useful for all sorts of things, but was primarily designed as a "good enough" hack for tunneling SSH connections.

As of version 0.3.8, there are two ways to access a raw port. One is the default, unreliable IP-tracking behavior described below, the other an explicit HTTP CONNECT which requires support from the client application.

IP-tracking based raw ports

As the pagekite.py front-end, and all the ports it listens on, are assumed to be shared by multiple back-ends, raw ports do not work like normal ports: they become temporarily available depending on which non-raw back-end the client last connected to.

So assuming the host some.pagekite.me registers both HTTP and RAW/22 back-ends, it should be possible to connect via. SSH to some.pagekite.me - but only if you visit http://some.pagekite.me/ first. The pagekite.py back-end command for this use-case would look like this:

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --backend=raw/22:YOURNAME:localhost:22:SECRET \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET

Note that doing things the other way around (SSH first, HTTP second) will generally not work. Also note that which ports are actually available depends on the configuration of the front-end.

WARNING: If the client IP address is shared or you are simply accessing many different resources behind the same pagekite.py front-end, results may be unpredictable - raw ports are only available for the domain most recently visited by your IP.

Within the context of SSH, this implies a few guidelines:

  1. The directive "CheckHostIP no" should be added to your .ssh/config file for the hosts behind pageKite.
  2. Password-based auth should be avoided, as you may end up connecting to the wrong site now and then ("PasswordAuthentication no").
  3. If ssh complains about a man-in-the-middle attack: DO NOT CONTINUE!
  4. Make sure your user accounts have strong enough passwords for your host to withstand incoming SSH brute force attacks!

Note that this is all a bit of a hack: a more reliable way to tunnel SSH would be to use the ProxyCommand directive (see ssh_config(5)) and use netcat and the HTTP CONNECT method described below.

For tunneling other things over raw ports, generally you will want to be sure you either use HTTP CONNECT (see below), or that there is some sort of handshake built into the protocol, so it will not go undetected when pagekite.py guesses wrong and routes the connection to the wrong back-end. If that kind of routing mistake sounds scary to you, then you probably do not want to use raw ports at all...

HTTP CONNECT and raw ports

Pagekite.py v0.3.8 front-ends natively supports the standard HTTP 1.0 CONNECT method for accessing raw back-ends.

This means you can place more or less any server behind PageKite, as long as the client can be configured to use an HTTP Proxy to connect: simply configure the client to use the PageKite front-end (and a normal port, not a raw port) as an HTTP Proxy.

As an example, the following lines in .ssh/config provide reliable direct access to an SSH server exposed via. pagekite.py and the PageKite.net service:

Host HOME.pagekite.me
ProxyCommand /bin/nc -X connect -x HOME.pagekite.me:443 %h %p

(See above for a sample pagekite.py command-line.)

This method requires client-side support, but removes all the uncertainty of the IP-tracking methods described above.

[ up ]

11. SSL/TLS back-ends, endpoints and SNI

Pagekite.py includes powerful support for name-based virtual hosting of multiple encrypted (HTTPS) web-sites behind a single IP address, something which until recently was practically largely impossible.

This is done based on the new TLS/SNI extension, along with some work-arounds for older clients (see Limitations below).

Encrypted back-ends (end-to-end)

The most secure use of TLS involves encrypted back-ends, registered with a --backend=https:NAME:... argument.

These back-ends themselves take care of the encryption and decryption, so all pagekite.py sees is an incomprehensible stream of binary - this is as secure as it gets!

How to obtain certificates and configure your back-ends is outside the scope of this document.

Encrypted tunnels

As of pagekite.py version 0.3.8, it is possible to connect to the front-end using a TLS-encrypted tunnel.

This is much more secure and is highly recommended: not only does this prevent people from sniffing the traffic between your web server and the front-end, it also protects you against any man-in-the-middle attacks where someone impersonates your front-end of choice.

This requires additional configuration both on the front-end and on the back.

On the front-end, you need to define a TLS endpoint (and certificate) for the domain of the SSL certificate (it does not actually have to match the domain name of the front-end, but the front- and back-ends have to agree what the certificate name is).

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  ...
  --tls_endpoint=frontend.domain.com:/path/to/key-and-cert-chain.pem \
  ...

On the back-end, you need to tell pagekite.py which certificate to accept, and possibly give it the path to a list of certificate authority certificates (the default works on Linux).

backend$ pagekite.py \
  --frontend=frontend.domain.com:443 \
  --fe_certname=frontend.domain.com \
  --ca_certs=/path/to/ca-certificates.pem \
  ...

Creating your own key and certificate (for tunnels)

Note that if you are running your own front-end, you do not need to purchase a commecial certificate for this to work - you can generate your own self-signed certificate and use that on both ends (this will actually be more secure than using a 3rd party certificate). To generate a certificate and a key, run this:

openssl req -new -x509 \
  -keyout site-key.pem -out site-cert.pem \
  -days 365 -nodes

OpenSSL will ask a few questions - you can answer them in any way you like, it does not really matter. For use on the server, the key and certificate must be combined into a single file, like so:

cat site-key.pem site-cert.pem > frontend.pem

This frontend.pem file you would then configure as a TLS endpoint on the front-end, and a copy of site-cert.pem would be distributed to all the back-ends and used with the --ca_certs parameter.

Encrypting unencrypted back-ends

If you want to enable encryption for back-ends which do not themselves support HTTPS, you can use the --tls_endpoint flag to ask pagekite.py itself to handle TLS for a given domain.

In this configuration, clients will communicate securely with the pagekite.py front-end, which will in turn forward decrypted requests to its backends, encrypting any replies as they are sent to the client.

As the tunnel between pagekite front- and back-ends itself is generally encapsulated in a secure TLS connection, this provides almost the same level of security as end-to-end encryption above, with the exception that the pagekite.py front-end has access to unencrypted data. So back-ends have to trust the person running their front-end!

Although not perfect, for those concerned with casual snooping on shared public WiFi, school or corporate networks, this is a significant security benefit.

The expected use-case for this feature, is to deploy a wild-card certificate at the front-end, allowing multiple back-ends to encrypt their communication without the administrative overhead of generating, distributing and maintaining keys and certificates on every single one. An example:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --isfrontend \
  --ports=80,443 --protos=http,websocket,https \
  --tls_endpoint=frontend.domain.com:/tunnel/key-and-cert-chain.pem \
  --tls_endpoint=*.domain.com:/path/to/key-and-cert-chain.pem \
  --domain=http:*.domain.com:SECRET

backend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --frontend=frontend.domain.com:443 \
  --fe_certname=frontend.domain.com \
  --backend=http:foo.domain.com:localhost:80:SECRET

This would enable both https://foo.domain.com/ and http://foo.domain.com/, without an explicit https back-end being defined or configured - but the tunnel between the back- and front-ends will be encrypted using TLS and the frontend.domain.com certificate.

Note: Currently SSL endpoints are only available at the front-end, but will be available on the back-end as well in a future release.

Note: This requires either pyOpenSSL or python 2.6+ and openssl support at the OS level.

Limitations

Windows XP (and older) ships with an implementation of the HTTPS (TLS) protocol which does not support the SNI extension. The same is true for certain older browsers under Linux (such as lynx), Android 1.6, and generally any old or poorly maintained HTTPS clients.

Without SNI, pagekite.py can not reliably detect which domain is being requested. In its absence, pagekite.py employs the following fall-back strategies to facilitate access:

  1. Obey the TLS/SNI extension, if present.
  2. Check if any known back-end was recently visited by the client IP, if one is found, try to use that for the domain.
  3. Fall back to a default domain specified by the --tls_default flag.

This means the common pattern of a clear-text HTTP website "upgrading" to HTTPS on certain pages is quite likely to work even for older browsers. But it is not guaranteed if the guest IP address is shared by multiple users, or if the browser is idle for too long (so the SSL connection times out and the IP expires from the tracking map maintained by pagekite.py).

When the above measures all fail and the wrong domain is chosen for routing the TLS request, browsers should detect a certificate mismatch and abort the request. So although inconvenient and not very user-friendly, this failure mode should not pose a significant security risk.

The best solution is of course to upgrade all browsers accessing your site to a recent version of Chrome, which includes proper SNI support.

As this may not be realistic, it might be wise want to provide an unencrypted (HTTP) version of your website for older clients, upgrading to HTTPS only when it has been verified to work; this can be done by fetching a javascript upgrade script from the HTTPS version of your site. Using javascript to ensure occasional (1/min) updates of content may also avoid the expiration problem.

[ up ]

12. Unix/Linux systems integration

When deploying pagekite.py as a system component on Unix, there are quite a few specialized arguments which can come in handy.

In addtion to --runas and --host (discussed above), pagekite.py understands these: --pidfile, --logfile and --daemonize, each of which does more or less what you would expect. A special case worth noting is --logfile=syslog, which instead of writing to a file, logs to the system log service.

Putting these all together, a real production invocation of pagekite.py at the front-end might look something like this:

frontend$ sudo pagekite.py \
  --runas=nobody:nogroup \
  --pidfile=/var/run/pagekite.pid \
  --logfile=syslog \
  --daemonize \
  --isfrontend \
  --host=1.2.3.4 \
  --ports=80,443 \
  --protos=http,https,websocket \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:*.YOURDOMAIN.COM:YOURSECRET \
  --domain=http,https,websocket:*.YOUROTHERDOMAIN.NET:YOUROTHERSECRET

That is quite a lot of arguments! So please read on, and learn how to generate a configuration file...

[ up ]

13. Saving your configuration

Once you have everything up and running properly, you may find it more convenient to save the settings to a configuration file. Pagekite.py can generate the configuration file for you: just add --settings to the very end of the command line and save the output to a file. On Linux or OS X, that might look something like this:

$ pagekite.py \
  --defaults \
  --backend=http:YOURNAME:localhost:80:SECRET \
  --settings \
| tee ~/.pagekite.rc

The default configuration file on Linux and Mac OS X is ~/.pagekite.rc, on Windows it is usually either C:\Users\USERNAME\pagekite.cfg or C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\pagekite.cfg.

If you save your settings to this location, they will be loaded by default whenever you run pagekite.py - which may not always be what you want if you are experimenting. To skip the configuration file, you can use the --clean argument, and to load an alternate configuration, you can use --optfile. Combining both, you might end up with something like this:

$ pagekite.py --clean --optfile=/etc/pagekite.cfg

The --optfile option can be used within configuration files as well, if you want to "include" a one configuration into another for some reason.

[ up ]

14. A word about security and logs

When exposing services to the wider Internet, as pagekite.py is designed to do, it is always important to keep some basic security principles in mind.

Pagekite.py itself should be quite secure - it never invokes any external processes and the only modifications it makes to the file-system are the log-files it writes.

The main security concern is your HTTP server, which you are exposing to the wider Internet. Covering general web server security is out of scope for this brief manual, but there is one important difference between running a web server on a public host and running one through pageKite:

Just like most other reverse proxies, pageKite will make your logs "look funny" and may break certain forms of naive access control. This is because from the point of view of your web server, all connections that travel over pageKite will appear to originate from localhost, with the IP address 127.0.0.1. This will break any access controls based on IP addresses.

For logging purposes, the HTTP and WebSocket protocols, the "standard" X-Forwarded-For header is added to initial requests (if HTTP 1.1 persistent connections are used, subsequent requests may be lacking the header), in all cases pagekite.py will report the actual remote IP in its own log.

[ up ]

15. Limitations and caveats

There are certain limitations to what can be accomplished using Pagekite, due to the nature of the underlying protocls. Here is a brief discussion of the most important ones.

HTTPS routing and Windows XP

HTTPS support depends on recent additions to the TLS protocol, which are unsupported by older browsers and operating systems - most importantly including the still common Windows XP.

The mechanisms employed by pagekite.py to work around these problems are discussed in the TLS/SSL section.

Raw ports

Raw ports are unreliable for clients sharing IP addresses with others or accessing multiple resources behind the same front-end at the same time.

See the discussed in the raw port section for details and instructions on how to reliably configure clients to use the HTTP CONNECT method to work around this limitation.

[ up ]

16. Credits and licence

Please see individual files for details on their licensing; as a rule Python source code falls under the same license as pagekite.py, documentation (including this document) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0, and sample configuration files are placed in the Public Domain.

If these licensing terms to not suit you for some reason, please contact the authors as it may be possible to negotiate alternate terms.

This document

This document is (C) Copyright 2010-2011, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson and The Beanstalks Project ehf.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

pagekite.py

Pagekite.py is (C) Copyright 2010-2011, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson and The Beanstalks Project ehf.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

[ up ]

About

Python implementation of the PageKite remote front-end protocols.

Front-end service, wiki and official releases are here: https://pagekite.net/

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • Python 83.4%
  • JavaScript 16.6%