Member Avatar for freesoft_2000

Hi everyone,

Sorry guys but i have to ask a very basic question about something. Are proxies and firewalls the same thing??

If not what are their differences. For example to connect to the internet you will sometimes need to specify any proxy in a browser used but is it the same for firewalls as well??

Another question i have is on proxies. Ther are three main different kind of proxies http, https and ftp. Given this proxy name
proxy.woll.com.au how would you know what type of proxy it is whether its a http, https or ftp proxy.

If it is of no inconvinience i hope someone can list some examples of http, https or ftp proxies so i roughly know what they are like.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Thank You

Yours Sincerely

Richard West

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Member Avatar for alc6379

Proxies and firewalls are different.

If you're wanting to secure an environment, you install a firewall, block of EVERYTHING, except for the ports on the proxy server (another physical machine, usually) that you want allowed out to the Internet. Then, you configure your client machines to use the proxy server for things like HTTP, FTP, HTTPS, etc. Normally, since you'd have your own mailserver in a setup like this, you wouldn't want to have the clients doing POP, IMAP, or SMTP directly out to the 'Net. The proxy could do filtering based on URLs, or based on content, so your clients can't get out to resources you want to deny access to.

The second configuration would be for the sake of caching, or performance increases. The only difference between that and the previous configuration is that you might not care so much about the firewall configuration-- just set the proxy up to do caching, and (hopefully) you'll benefit from a speed increase when browsers hit commonly accessed pages.

Squid for Linux/UNIX/BSD is a great example of a cache/proxy server, and I've heard ISA (Internet Security and Accelleration) Server for Windows Server is pretty good. Offhand, those are the ones I think of. As far as what services are available on a proxy, you'll just have to try to find out-- configure your browser to use the proxy, and try one of each protocol. If any are not allowed through, then obviously the proxy doesn't support it.

Member Avatar for freesoft_2000

Hi everyone,

Thanks Alex. Just the informaion i needed

Richard West

Member Avatar for alc6379

No problem! Happy to help!

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