Forward Http Request to different machine

Question

I am working on a MAC machine and expected to use some of the Webservices which are present on a different network. The general way to access these webservices is through VPN to that network and then access. For some known reason I am not able to (supposed to / expected to / allowed to) install the VPN client on the MAC machine. Hence I would like to perform some kind of activity on some other local machine (windows based) so that From MAC I would request local machine and from local machine I would redirect to the VPN based machine.

Can some one help me in doing this?

(I am aware that I can setup a simple web service at my another machine and programatically forward the request to the VPN based service, but I am looking for something that would not need any programming except some setup etc).

Also I read some of the questions on serverfault, but most of them talk about Apache and I do not have this (and not possible to get this) on my other machine.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called a reverse proxy; you send a request to http://windows/vpn_network and IIS receives the command, fetches http://vpn_network for you, and provides it at the first URL. This is typically done with Apache or nginx and that is why you will see a lot of references to that.

It is possible to do with IIS 7 URL Rewrite and ARR. That link will walk you through it and it does involve having access and permissions to the IIS server, obviously, as you will be installing and configuring modules. The configuration is minimal and is not equivalent to writing code and you can skip the section on caching.

Unfortunately to my knowledge there is no other way of doing this without using some form of rewrite or reverse proxy. The next best thing would be installing a remote desktop client on your Mac (such as CoRD) and RDPing in to the Windows box and doing your work from there.