WinSock Relay Home Page

WinSock Relay 1.0

WinSock Relay is a tool which allows you to route incoming socket connections on your computer to a different port and/or computer. This is sometimes referred to as IP forwarding.

I originally wrote WinSock Relay to allow multiple computers to share a dial-up connection. It would allow you to point your email client or web browser to a server on your network running WinSock Relay. WinSock Relay would detect incoming connections on the server, automatically dial-up to your ISP, then forward the connection to the real mail or web server. When done, it would disconnect to save you on your ISP charges.

Ok, that was 1996. Today, dial-up is pretty much history. Also, Windows NT supports IP forwarding in the OS if you can figure out how to configure it. So why use WinSock Relay? WinSock Relay is simple to configure, and you can easily save and load configurations. WinSock Relay can bypass all Windows socket security. WinSock Relay can log all traffic that passes through it for later viewing. This can be very useful for debugging HTTP and other socket communications.

The following picture is an example of how WinSock Relay can be used. I have a proxy server on my network named "proxysrv". I run WinSock Relay on my box "Foo" and tell it to forward all incoming traffic on port 80 to port 80 on "proxysrv". I can then configure all the browsers on my network to use "Foo" as their proxy server. The result is that my browsers will connect to "Foo", but they will actually be talking through "Foo" to "proxysrv". Why is this useful? Well, maybe "proxysrv" is on a different network that many of my computers cannot access. Maybe "proxysrv" doesn't allow access to the other computers on my network. Maybe I want to log all traffic from my browser.

I added the traffic logging for my own debugging purposes, and therefore there is no UI to enable it. If you wish to turn it on, you can open a saved configuration file (WSR file) and look for "DebugMode=0". If you change this to "DebugMode=1" for a given entry in the file, then that entry will log all traffic that passes through it. The traffic will be logged to text files name DUMPXXXX.TXT, where XXXX is a number that starts at 1 and is incremented for each new connection established through the port. You can view the text files directly (with something like notepad), or you can use the included WsrParse program. WsrParse can group packets together and display the traffic in either text or binary format.

Download the latest version here...

WinSock Relay 1.0 (Windows 95 - Windows 7) [396k]

WinSock Relay is completely free to use. You may not profit from the distribution of it, nor may you bundle it with another product. If you would like to link to WinSock Relay, please do so by linking to this page (http://SteveMiller.net/WsRelay)