[Discuss] Web proxy

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

I would like to implement what I believe is a simple web proxy, but it
requires a certain amount of customization regarding how the proxy
contacts the servers, which I think would be very simple if I used the
right proxy.  Unfortunately, my knowledge of the features of open-source
proxies is very small and searching online is not producing useful
results, probably because I don't know the right words for describing
the features I want in a proxy.

The problem is to sort the HTTP/HTTPS requests based on the host-part of
their request-URLs.  An ssh session needs to be made to a different host
name (derived from the host-part), and that session used to forward the
request to the original host name.  A simple implementation would be to
start a process

    ssh -N -L [local port]:host-name:443 derived-host-name

and then forward the request via localhost:[local port].

However, it seems to me that one can avoid having to carefully track and
tear down the ssh processes by instead configuring the proxy to,
effectively, "forward requests to host-name by creating a subprocess

   ssh derived-host-name ncat host-name 443

and using that process's stdin and stdout as the socket to send the
request to."  The advantage of the latter method being that it
automatically tears down the ssh if the main process terminates.

Then again, maybe I'm lucky and some proxy implements this behavior
directly.

Does anyone have any hints?  Thanks!

Dale