This is the homepage of frox. It is a transparent ftp proxy which is released under the GPL. It optionally supports caching (either through an external http cache (eg. squid), or by maintaining a cache locally), and/or running a virus scanner, on downloaded files. It is written with security in mind, and in the default setup it runs as a non root user in a chroot jail.
There is now a mailing
list <frox-user at lists.sourceforge.net>
which may be used for questions, bug reports, feature requests,
etc.
The latest stable version is 0.7.18. New additions in this major version are support for transparent proxying under BSD and other ipfilter using OSes, running from inetd, transparent virus scanning of downloaded files, per host config file subsections, and the ability to limit connections by IP. There are also extensive internal code changes including a reworking of the local caching, the buffer handling, and the config file parsing code.
This minor release fixes a bug introduced in version 0.7.16 which prevents Deny ACLs from being parsed properly. You should upgrade if you rely on Deny ACLs. It also contains some logging improvements, an option to force retrieval through the HTTP proxy, and optional support for proftpd style altering of argv so that 'ps' gives some useful information.
Here is a copy of the README, and ChangeLog files, and you can download the latest version as a source tarball. Source can be browsed online here, and more recent snapshots downloaded using darcs if you wish. If you want to do any testing there is a test suite for frox here. Older versions and some frox binaries are linked from the download page. The source should compile and run on any version of linux with 2.0, 2.2 or 2.4 kernels, and also *BSD. It runs in non transparent mode on Mac OSX. It should also be alright on other unix-like OSes, and I would be interested in hearing success/failure reports.
The html documentation is in the source tarball, and also online here
Updated 2005-02-04, James Hollingshead