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Re: [users@httpd] different kinds of proxies

Rich Schumacher

2008-07-24

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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:50 AM, André Warnier <aw@ice-sa.com> wrote:
Hi. Me again butting in, because I am confused again.
When users workstations within a company's local network have browsers configured to use an internal "http proxy" in order to access Internet HTTP servers, is this internal proxy system a "forward" or a "reverse" proxy ?
I am not talking here about a generic IP Internet router doing NAT, I am talking specifically about a "web proxy".  This HTTP proxy may also do NAT of course, but its main function I believe is to cache pages from external servers for the benefit of internal workstations, no ?
If this is a forward proxy, then I do not understand the comment of Solprovider that seems to indicate that such things are obsolete and/or dangerous.  At any rate, they are in use in most corporate networks I am aware of.

André

André,

What you are talking about is a forward proxy and most of the time they are transparent to the users behind them.  Things do get a little blurry, though, as sometimes they handle routing and NATing as well. SafeSquid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeSquid) of this in terms of software.  They are also hardware based solutions, such as Barracuda networks web filter, but I do not believe this does caching.

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