proxy?

[Peter]

Hi,

I have an "image server" which streams a jpg when requested (for
example I can get a jpg by calling a url like
http://192.168.110.100?img=22.

This image server only accepts requests from one other machine (I call
it "computer 2"), and I need to make the image server available to the
outside world.

So I want (I think) to make some sort of "proxy" server on "computer
2", which outside clients can access. Outside clients call the "proxy
server", which then calls the image server, gets the requested jpg, and
streams it back to the client.

Does that sound reasonable?

And how to I approach this? Can I just set the client's response stream
to the response stream my "proxy server" gets from its request to the
image server?
Thanks for any pointers to get me started,
Peter

[Peter Duniho]

On Tue, 27 May 2008 06:42:08 -0700, Peter <xd****@hotmail.comwrote:

[...]
Does that sound reasonable?

And how to I approach this? Can I just set the client's response stream
to the response stream my "proxy server" gets from its request to the
image server?

The approach sounds reasonable. It's a common enough technique, assuming
you can't have the image server itself directly exposes to the outside
world.

As for connecting the streams, no you can't just set the client's response
stream to the response stream from the image server. You're not specific
about what classes you're actually using, but in all of the .NET i/o
classes I've seen, the stream for the object is specifically connected to
the i/o resource. You can't just swap them around, and if you could, it
still wouldn't do what you want.

You need to explicitly write to the client stream. It occurs to me that
..NET might some sort of "stream adapter" that works as a pipe, where you
pass it an output stream and an input stream and it automatically copies
the data from one to the other. But I haven't seen that class. It
wouldn't be hard to write though, and IMHO it's probably the right
approach here, assuming whatever classes you're using don't already have
that specific kind of functionality built in.

Pete