proxy server configuration behind firewall

[blackchester]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to configure Iplanet Netscape proxy server 3.6 behind a firewall.

There are a couple issues.
First, when I try to access the proxy server from inside the firewall, it seems to take forever to load the page in question.

Secondly, when I try to access the proxy server port, 8080, through the firewall, the browser seems to become aware of the proxy server name. Is this suppose to happen? Isn't the firewall suppose to hide this information? After a little, the browser does a timeout and quits trying to access the machine.

The router is only four ports and is inside my corporate LAN. As a result, we are connecting to the corporate DNS for name resolution. Plus, there is no DNS machine inside the router itself. Could this be causing a problem? The names of the server machines have been entered in the hosts files.

Sorry for such a long post... I'm just against a wall.

Thanks,

 

[jad]

umm ... the browser still knows which machine it is, if any sites use javascript to interogate the browser they will respond with the 'true' information about your machine, also proxies can add the information on who they are forwarding for.

taking a long time for the first page could be due to the server going to sleep, a problem with DNS, or 'Automatically detect setting' being turned on in your windows internet setup.

what is the firewall and what system is the proxy running on?

 

[blackchester]

The firewall is a built into a router, ISB pro 400. The system is win2k. However, I have installed the proxy server on an NT machine and it behaves the same way.

I thought that the proxy server is suppose to suppress the real identity of the target machines.

TIA

 

[jad]

umm, no, not necessarily, proxies are a sort of way of allowing machines without a direct connection to the internet to have a connection to the internet ...


if you go to your win2k machine, and try accessing the sites from that machine (not via the proxy) do you still get the time lag?

 

[blackchester]

If I try to access the web site directly, there is no lag.

I'm at a loss.

 

[blackchester]

Alright... I think there is some confusion on my part about the purpose of a proxy server.

For some reason, I thought that a proxy server was suppose to act as a barrier between a web browser and the target host; somewhat similar to a firewall.

However, the literature I read continually mention the caching ability of the proxy server and makes no mention of protecting the target server.

Is this the main purpose of the proxy server?

If it is, then does it make sense for me to have a proxy server sitting just inside a firewall? Since my original assumption was that the proxy server protected the internal web servers, it made logical sense. Now, however, I'm reconsidering that action.

What should I be looking at if not a proxy server?

I'm trying to create fail-over servers for the web-servers. Each web server must use the same web-alias.

Sorry for misleading anyone earlier.

 

[jad]

NAT, network address translation, might be your answer.

the machines perceive themselves to have direct access to the internet, but really there is a box that translates their IP address into an internet IP address ... the internet cannot access them directly (unless you set it up wrong

the internet only ever sees the NAT router, the NAT router knows which machine asked for which piece of information, and so therefore does the switching, even if you only have 1 real internet IP address.

 

[anooo]

hi ....

I need help in setting up squid proxy server on Linux 7.3. I need to set this up behind a firewall. I have provide a proxy for DNS/DHCP server, webserver, Exchange server. Can any one help me out in setting up the squid proxy server. i am struck with the squid.conf file i am not getting in way to solve the situation and i have thi assignment due very soon.

thank you..../

 

[jad]

if it is inside a hardware firewall you could look into getting 'delegate'

http://www.delegate.org/

otherwise yo're asking a lot of questions.

exchange server could use imap/pop3, and an SMTP server
for imap:

http://www.washington.edu/imap/

for smtp:

http://www.sendmail.org/

dhcp needs a dhcp server (probably one with your linux distro)
similarly dns.

probably want to post this as a seperate entity on the linux server forum. forum54