# Xmpp from behind firewall via http proxy - what proxy software?

**URL:** <https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/xmpp-from-behind-firewall-via-http-proxy-what-proxy-software/198>\
**Category:** Pidgin\
**Tags:** xmpp\
**Created:** [September 25, 2024, 12:22pm UTC](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/xmpp-from-behind-firewall-via-http-proxy-what-proxy-software/198 "2024-09-25T12:22:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![alexishuxley](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discourse.imfreedom.org/alexishuxley/32/95_2.png) [@alexishuxley](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/u/alexishuxley)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2024, 12:22pm UTC](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/xmpp-from-behind-firewall-via-http-proxy-what-proxy-software/198/1 "2024-09-25T12:22:16Z")

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[As a new discourse user, I’m not allowed to put more than 2 links in this post. consequently I’ve had to change all occurrences of ‘http’ to ‘ttp’.]

I would like to use pidgin with xmpp from behind a corporate firewall, which allows only outgoing ttp/s. In the xmpp account setup in pidgin, there is a Proxy tab, in which I guess I can specify details of an http proxy.

At home I have a front-end apache web server with several vhosts configured, proxying to various back-end web services (nextcloud, wordpress, …). I have added a new vhost configuration so that ttp://xmpp-proxy.example.com/ reverse proxies my-xmpp-proxy-container:80 on my home network.

For the proxy software, I was hoping to use something light like socat, but when I run something like:

socat -v -d -d TCP-LISTEN:80,crlf,reuseaddr,fork TCP:jabber.de:5222

socat produces no output when i enable the account and I get a popup “Either the host name or port number specified for your given proxy type is invalid”.

I have verified that from behind the corporate firewall I can connect with telnet to [xmpp-proxy.example.com:80](http://xmpp-proxy.example.com:80), and then when I type:

GET /blah HTTP/1.1  
Host:   
Accept: text/html

then socat gets it, relays the request to [jabber.de](http://jabber.de), which, understandably then complains about protocol, but at least I see it is getting through.

Okay, so socat probably wouldn’t know what to do with whatever pidgin sent it, but pidgin isn’t even establishing a connection through to socat.

So my questions are:

1. why is pidgin not getting connected to socat? Have I misunderstood the proxy settings?

2. how can I make socat correctly handle whatever pidgin says to it?

3. if this is never going to work with socat, then what software should I be using instead?

Many thanks!

PS I will upgrade to https once I have this working with http.

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**Author:** ![grim](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discourse.imfreedom.org/grim/32/4_2.png) [@grim](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/u/grim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2024, 7:09pm UTC](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/xmpp-from-behind-firewall-via-http-proxy-what-proxy-software/198/2 "2024-09-25T19:09:34Z")

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Can you try opening the debug window from `Help -> Debug Window` and then try to connect? You should see something like `proxy: connecting to ... ` and hopefully there will be something useful there.

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**Author:** ![alexishuxley](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discourse.imfreedom.org/alexishuxley/32/95_2.png) [@alexishuxley](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/u/alexishuxley)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2024, 10:45am UTC](https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/xmpp-from-behind-firewall-via-http-proxy-what-proxy-software/198/3 "2024-09-26T10:45:25Z")

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Thanks for the suggestion. It did show that it was connecting so I think I must have done something stupid, and I also had a rethink and decided it would be less “deviant” to try to use BOSH, though I have questions there too, but I’ll open a new topic for that.