CheckProxyAccess

A tool to check a list of web servers over different proxy servers. Very useful for migrations, to check if the new proxy servers can reach all the sites.

Installation

Use Maven to build the jar file:

mvn package

This will create a jar file named checkproxyaccess-${VERSION}.jar in the target directory. Alternatively you can just use javac to compile all the java files in src/main/java/cc/pusch/checkproxyaccess by hand, because this programm does not have any dependencies to external libraries.

Usage

Command line syntax

java -jar checkproxyaccess-1.0.jar -i input_file -p proxy1 [-p proxy2, -p proxy3, ...] [-o out_file] [-v] [-t num_threads]

-i The input file

First you need an input file with the targets to check. The entries can be full URLs like https://www.example.com/somepath/somedoc.html or host[:port] combinations like somehost.example.com, otherhost.example.com:8080. If you don't specify a protocol we treat everything as http except connections to port 443 and port 8443 these will be treated as https connections.

-p The proxies to check

Proxy servers to check have to be in the well known form protocol://hostname:port the only execption is DIRECT which uses no proxy. The whole purpose of this program is to test connections over multiple proxy servers at once, so you can have more than one -p options.

-o The out file

If no out file is specified the results are just printed to stdout, which is fine for small tests but maybe not so fine if you test thousands of sites, this is where the output file might get handy.

-v Be "verbose"

This is not the classical "print lots of information during the run" type of verbose switch. It just enables the stdout printing of the results, even when an output file is set.

-t The number of threads

That is just how many checks we do in parallel.

The output format

Last but not least, the output format. The whole purpose of this program is to test the reachability of a huge list of web servers over different proxy servers. So the output contains the url and the http reply code received from the web servers in a semicolon separated list. The ordering of the results is identical to the ordering of the -p options. Here a short example:

$ java -jar checkproxyaccess-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar -i 2test -p http://some.proxy:8080 -p DIRECT
https://www.github.com:443;200;200;
http://www.reddit.com;500;301;

This tells us that the http requests to GitHub produced the same results over the proxy and directly. On the other hand reddit was not reachable over the proxy server (HTTP reply code 500), while there was no problem reaching the site directly (HTTP reply code 301).

I use awk to process the output further for example

awk -F \; '$2 != $3 {print $1}'

would print out all urls that had different results.