Rsync through proxy using HTTP Basic Authentication?

[Dave Dykstra]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 02:21:53PM -0500, Paul.L.Snyder at gsk.com wrote:
> Is it possible to rsync through a firewall that requires HTTP basic
> authentication?  The RSYNC_PROXY variable seems to correctly direct the
> request to go through the HTTP proxy server on the firewall, but there's no
> way to specify a username/password combo.  The error message reported by
> rsync is "bad response from proxy - HTTP/1.1 401 Authentication required",
> which is not unexpected, under the circumstances.
> 
> If I'm reading the manual correctly, the USER and RSYNC_PASSWD environment
> variables only affect rsync's authentication to the remote rsync server.
> 
> With many apps, you'd specify http_proxy_user and http_proxy_pass in your
> environment, but this doesn't seem to work with rsync.  (The fact that it's
> not mentioned in the manual made this a thin hope, anyway).
> 
> If there's absolutely no way to do this using rsync alone, does anyone know
> of a simple HTTP proxy program that could be configured to perform the
> authentication on its own?  That is to say: one could run this proxy on the
> local machine, configured to listen to only local requests.  RSYNC_PROXY
> would then be pointed to this local proxy.  When an rsync is initiated, the
> local proxy would pass the request to the firewall, and respond to the
> firewall's 401 with the correct user/password combo, with rsync none the
> wiser.
> 
> Any ideas will be gratefully received.


Wow, I didn't know that rsync supported the RSYNC_PROXY.  It's such a
simple addition to add the Basic authentication though it should be quite
easy for you or somebody to come up with a patch, and it wouldn't be a
burden for it to be added to the official rsync.  It just needs an addition
a http header of
    Proxy-Authorization: Basic NNNNNN
where NNNNNN is a base64 encoding of "username:password".  Coincidentally
or not, rsync already has a base64_encode() function.

- Dave