All About Wingates

Updated: 09-06-01

What is a Wingate?
What the heck are they for?
How do I get Wingates?
How do I use these things?

Q: What is a Wingate?

A: A wingate is normally a program which allows multiply computers on a network to share one internet connection. Many users foolishly have their wingate setup for anonymous outside access which means we can share their internet connection also. Many are run from users at home with broadband connections and can be upload capped at anywhere from 16KBps - 24KBps, occasionally you will stumble across a nice and fast wingate with a really good transfer speed.

Q: What the heck are they for?

A: Primarily Wingates are used as an aid in FXPing files from one pub to another. Now why do you need to use a wingate? Well most pubs have FXP transferring disabled and you also cannot FXP from one NT pub to another NT pub. If you use a wingate almost any set of pubs becomes FXPable because the files go through the wingate. One pub thinks it is uploading to the wingate and the other thinks it is getting uploaded to from the wingate. The only downside to this method of FXP transfer is that if the wingate is slow your transfer will go slow. Always use the fastest wingate you have to speed up transfers. Even with 56k you can FXP, and transfer files and unbelievable speeds because FXPing uses almost none of your own bandwidth.

Secondly Wingates can be used to hide your own identity when messing with pubs. Whether that be uploading, tagging or just browsing. I always enable my Wingate while browsing pubs just to be safe. You will notice a slight slowdown but it is worth it because most Wingates do not have logging enabled, so the sysop of a pub would have to do a lot of work just to get your ip. Even if logging is enabled on the wingate most sysops will not bother to annoy the people for their logs.

Q: How do I get Wingates?

A: You can find them in posts in the "Scans" section of most FXP boards.

Q: How do I use these things?

A: I have found that this is a mystery to many people. It can be tricky but once you figure it out it's simple to do again. I primarily use Wingates with FlashFXP, but have also gotten them to work in SmartFTP (May add info on this later). If you don't already have FlashFXP downloaded and installed do that now. Now all you need to do is go into the options and to the "Proxy / Firewall / Ident" tab and enter in the correct information. For the type select "User with no login (user@host port)," the second option (user@host:port) can also be used when the first one is causes the wingate to get error messages. Enter in your Wingates address where it says "Host" and set the port number to 21. If you have a port 23 wingate it will not work properly for FXP transfers, any other port and it is most likely not a wingate. Some pubs/Wingates also want to request and Ident so enable this and just put "@msn" for the user id. That's it, your now ready to connect to pubs anonymously and FXP with ease.

TAKEN FROM JTPFXP