[jcifs] Re: Jcifs over the internet and proxies

[Oliver Schoett]

Pattison, David wrote:

> I'm wondering how or if there is a solution for the following 
> situation: We have a customer at an internal company site, who is 
> accessing our web-app over the internet, with the app being help at 
> another company site. The problem is that both company sites are 
> behind proxies/firewalls (I believe it is an MS proxy of some kind), 
> and the web app itself is on a personal network.

The NTLM authentication protocol requires that a TCP connection is held 
during the exchange, so that challenge and response can be matched.  
With a proxy, this no longer works, because both sides have separate 
connections with the proxy, not with each other (this is required by the 
HTTP RFC 2616, sec. 8.1.3).

A secure soution to your problem would be to establish a VPN connection 
betwen the sites, or from the client into the network where the 
application resides. Over the VPN, you can then establish normal, 
unproxied TCP connections.

Regards,

Oliver Schoett