dproxy was initially written when Netscape Navigator 4 was the only browser availble for Linux, and BIND was a bloated beast with many security issues (is it still?).

Unfortunately Netscape 4 had an annoying bug where it would lockup and eat all your CPU while it was attempting to resolve a name. This would happen whenever your PPP dialup connection would drop.

Without the source code to Navigator, all I could do was write some software that always replied promptly to Netscape. dproxy was written to run on dial-up gateway machines and behave nicely when the gateway was not connected.

So it turns out that a few years later ADSL and WIFI are all the rage and many embedded routers run Linux. Most need some basic DNS support that doesn't consume much flash space. dproxy becomes useful once more.

Known products that use dproxy:

• Netgear DG834 -- Source code downloads
• WRT54G firmware replacement

dproxy-nexgen
dproxy-nexgen is a rewrite of the core of dproxy. dproxy no longer uses gethostbyname() and so has no need to fork to handle new requests. This means dproxy is much faster and lighter resources.

dproxy-0.5

• proper config file support
• deny file support to help filtering add/spam
• better install support
• bug fixes

Thanks to soureforge.net dproxy can be accessed by a number of means:

• dproxy group page on sourceforge.net
• CVS details
• Browse the CVS repository
• Anonymous ftp
• Direct HTTP download dproxy-0.5.tar.gz
• Mailing list

Useful Resources

Here are some sites that were helpful while writing this software:

•  Ethereal network analyser
•  Dents, DNS server