News::Scan and SSL

[scain]

Hello,

I am working on a project to collect statistics from private news groups that are running inside my company. Theoretcially, News::Scan should work great, but the server requires that clients use SSL. I know nothing about using SSL sockets, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to create a SSL socket and then have News::Scan talk to the news server through that. If you think it should be possilble, can you point me to good, simple documentation on suing SSLeasy that might make this task a little easier?

Thanks much,

[redhotpenguin]

Looking at the source of News::Scan, Net::NNTP is used to make a connection to the NNTP server with the following command:

$client = Net::NNTP->new(@args);

Net::NNTP uses IO::Socket under the hood, so you may be able to create Net::NNTP::SSL which would use IO::Socket::SSL instead to make the connection over SSL. IO::Socket::SSL is described as 'Nearly transparent SSL encapsulation for IO::Socket::INET', so I would think that this approach may be the cleanest for a perl based solution.

Update: Adjusted comment after realizing the poster already stated that the server requires ssl.

[Animator]

Not really a perl solution, but you could set up a tunnel, which handles the SSL-part (http://www.stunnel.org for example).

And then you can connect to the tunnel, which will then forward all traffic to the correct server/port after encrypting everything...