pxys is a free efficient proxy checker service for IRCU. It features a lightweight IRC service pseudo-server and a powerful open proxy scanner. It is able to rigorously detect several types of misconfigured or vulnerable proxy, like insecure WinGate, Cisco routers, Socks v4 and v5, IRC bouncers and HTTP proxies on configurable ports.

pxys is intended to be used by IRC network administration (currently only Undernet IRCU and some P10 derivatives are supported). It only uses a temporary local IP cache and doesn't need to check against a DNSBL. Thus pxys guarantees a reliable detection and doesn't ban innocent users. See the Undernet ProxyScanner web page.

pxys has been rewritten and the resulted "technology release" version 2 is now available. It is faster! It only works with recent versions of IRCU. It has been better designed (event-based model instead of multithreading model), however CPU and memory efficiency is still a priority. The pseudo-server part takes less than 100MB RAM for a 100000 network clients and a very little CPU time if kqueue(2) or epoll(2) are available. It can now handles channels: so it's possible to recheck a whole channel. More channels stuffs will be added in the future (like proxy floodnet channels detection). The scanner part is now separated from the IRC pseudo-server part, as it might be used more generally in the future. The scanner can take advantage of multiple CPUs with the help of libpeak, an experimental parallel events library, partly written especially for pxys. Additionally, for big needs or to avoid some clients firewall warnings, it is now possible to scan your clients from multiple source IPs.

General snapshot of the new pxys2's design:

Please take a look at pxys2's documentation for more details about requirements, features and installation procedure.

pxys v1 is still available and recommended for older version of IRCU, or systems that aren't yet supported by pxys v2 (please note that pxys v2 depends on libpeak's supported systems). It is, however, slower than pxys v2.