Polipo

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Polipo
Developer(s) Juliusz Chroboczek
Stable release 1.0.4.1 / February 2, 2010 (2010-02-02)
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Type web cache, proxy server
License MIT License
Website www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~jch/software/polipo/

Polipo is a lightweight forwarding and caching web proxy server. Polipo is HTTP 1.1-compliant, supports IPv4, IPv6, traffic filtering and privacy-enhancement. To minimize latency, Polipo both pipelines multiple resource requests and multiplexes multiple transactions onto the same TCP/IP connection.[1]

Polipo is free software[2] released under the MIT License.[3] It runs on GNU/Linux, OpenWrt, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

Polipo can be configured to use on-disk cache and serve cached content when offline and perform various forms of content filtering.

Design

The polipo proxy server connecting an internal network and the Internet.
The polipo proxy taking requests from an internal network and forwarding them to the Internet.

Polipo is designed to be used as a personal web cache or a web cache shared among a few users to boost internet access.[4][5] Designed to be fast, lightweight and small, it is useful when the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable. Because of this reason, it has been put to uses such as a tether on the OpenWrt.

Features

The fast, lightweight and small memory footprint proxy server polipo uses a variety of techniques:[2]

  • Polipo will upgrade client requests to HTTP/1.1 even if they come in as old HTTP/1.0.
  • Polipo will make web browsing faster or at least appear to have less latency.
  • Polipo will cache the initial segment of a download and can complete it later using Range requests, in case of interrupts.
  • Polipo can to some extent substitute for filtering, privacy-enhancing proxies such as Privoxy or WWWOFFLE, it provides capabilities to block or redirect requests, censor HTTP request headers and referrer information.[6]
  • Polipo has complete support for IPv6.
  • Since Polipo can speak both IPv4 and IPv6, Polipo can be used as a bridge between the IPv4 and IPv6 Internets.
  • Polipo can speak the SOCKS 4 & SOCKS 5 protocols.
  • Polipo does HTTP 1.1 pipelining well, so it can enhance internet communication latency.
  • Polipo serves as a web cache.

Limitations

Polipo is limited to 2G or 4G file sizes on 32 bit systems which will cause errors when serving large requests.

GUI wrappers

Some independent graphical user interface (GUI) projects are:

  • Solipo[7] - a GUI wrapper application for polipo on Windows OS
  • Dolipo[8] - a GUI wrapper for Mac OS X

See also

References

  1. ↑ "rfc2068 - HTTP/1.1". Retrieved 2010-09-23. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Polipo — a caching web proxy". Retrieved 2010-02-05. 
  3. ↑ "Polipo distribution conditions". Retrieved 2010-09-23. 
  4. ↑ "Boost your Internet browsing - Install Polipo". Retrieved 2010-02-05. 
  5. ↑ "The Polipo Manual". Retrieved 2010-09-23. 
  6. ↑ "Censoring headers - The Polipo Manual". Retrieved 2013-04-30. 
  7. ↑ "Solipo". Retrieved 2010-09-23. 
  8. ↑ "Dolipo". Retrieved 2010-09-23. 

External links

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