Altap Salamander: Plugins: WinSCP: Dialog Boxes: Configuring Session

Proxy Tab (Login Dialog)

Proxy tab allows you to configure WinSCP to use various types of proxy in order to make its network connections.

You need to check Advanced options to reveal the tab.

Setting the Proxy Type

First, select what type of proxy you want WinSCP to use for its network connections. The default setting is None. In this mode no proxy is used for the connection.

Selecting HTTP allows you to proxy your connections through a web server supporting the HTTP CONNECT command, as documented in RFC 2817.

Selecting SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 allows you to proxy your connections through a SOCKS server.

Many firewalls implement a less formal type of proxy in which a user can make a Telnet connection directly to the firewall machine and enter a command such as connect myhost.com 22 to connect through to an external host. Selecting Telnet allows you to tell WinSCP to use this type of proxy.

Selecting Local allows you to specify an arbitrary command on the local machine to act as a proxy. When the session is started, instead of creating a TCP connection, WinSCP runs the specified command, and uses its standard input and output streams.

This could be used, for instance, to talk to some kind of network proxy that WinSCP does not natively support; or you could tunnel a connection over something other than TCP/IP entirely.

Username and Password

If your proxy requires authentication, you can enter a username and a password in the Username and Password boxes.

Authentication is not fully supported for all forms of proxy:

  • Username and password authentication is supported for HTTP proxies and SOCKS5 proxies.
    • With SOCKS5, authentication is via CHAP if the proxy supports it, otherwise the password is sent to the proxy in plain text.
    • With HTTP proxying, the only currently supported authentication method is "basic", where the password is sent to the proxy in plain text.
  • SOCKS4 can use the Username field, but does not support passwords.
  • You can specify a way to include a username and password in the Telnet/Local proxy command.

Telnet/Local Proxy Command

If you are using the Telnet proxy type, the usual command required by the firewall's Telnet server is connect, followed by a host name and a port number. If your proxy needs a different command, you can enter an alternative here.

If you are using the Local proxy type, the local command to run is specified here.

In this string, you can use \n to represent a new-line, \r to represent a carriage return, \t to represent a tab character, and \x followed by two hex digits to represent any other character. \\ is used to encode the \ character itself.

Also, the special strings %host and %port will be replaced by the host name and port number you want to connect to. The strings %user and %pass will be replaced by the proxy username and password you specify. To get a literal % sign, enter %%.

If a Telnet proxy server prompts for a username and password before commands can be sent, you can use a command such as: 

%user\n%pass\nconnect %host %port\n

This will send your username and password as the first two lines to the proxy, followed by a command to connect to the desired host and port. Note that if you do not include the %user or %pass tokens in the Telnet command, then the Username and Password configuration fields will be ignored.

Name Resolution When Using a Proxy

If you are using a proxy to access a private network, it can make a difference whether DNS name resolution is performed by WinSCP itself (on the client machine) or performed by the proxy.

The Do DNS name lookup at proxy end configuration option allows you to control this. If you set it to No, WinSCP will always do its own DNS, and will always pass an IP address to the proxy. If you set it to Yes, WinSCP will always pass host names straight to the proxy without trying to look them up first.

If you set this option to Auto (the default), WinSCP will do something it considers appropriate for each type of proxy. Telnet, HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies will have host names passed straight to them; SOCKS4 proxies will not.

The original SOCKS4 protocol does not support proxy-side DNS. There is a protocol extension (SOCKS4A) which does support it, but not all SOCKS4 servers provide this extension. If you enable proxy DNS and your SOCKS4 server cannot deal with it, this might be why.

Proxying Local Host Connections

Connections to the local host (the host name localhost, and any loopback IP address) are not proxied by default. It is very unlikely that this behavior would ever cause problems, but if it does you can change it by enabling Consider proxying local host connections. (see note 1)

Notes:

1) The text is copy of PuTTY User Manual or was inspired by it.