A proxy server is an intermediate gateway that forwards and routes traffic between computers on a network. Despite popular believe they are not just for anonymous surfing, They are often used for caching, and web filtering.

Caching:

First a caching proxy is somethign that caches web related data like static files such as CSS files, HTML, and images. This is too speed up delivery of such files to improve your percieved loading speed of the web page. In web browsers there is already a cache, but its a personal cache. A caching proxy will work for everyone on the network speeding up delivery of already requested files.

You can look at it like this, George is at work and 12:00PM hits on the clock so George gets his coffee and views CNN.com and browses several of the top news articles during his launch break. Then Susan comes in after launch and goes in for her shift and George leaves home, now Susan during her break goes to CNN.com and views the same top stories that George already read. Now CNN will load many times faster for her as most of the images and files are already locally cached at a proxy gateway using something like Squid-Cache (The most popular Proxy Cache software). Susan is happy and doesn't notice a thing except that CNN is faster to load. Thats the bottom line and purpose of a caching proxy. To speed up the delivery of static web content. You could even install Squid on your home computer to have the same effect!

 

Web Filtering Proxies

Depsite popular opinion not all Web filtering proxies just block websites, but in more broader sense they intercept traffic and modify incoming requests to remove advertisments, 'internet Junk', such as the Proxy software Privoxy describes itself as, or remove and detect viruses and spam. But there are some web filtering proxies Like Dansguardian, and also the Squid Guard. (Which is a port of Squid Cache) that do block websites. You can imagine they work like this. George goes onto  his computer at work and types www.myspace.com into his browser. The Filter proxy intercepts George's request and sees' he is visiting a blocked website. The proxy filter then stops the request and sends back a blocked page. Second example, Susan goes to her computer and views www.myspace.com and Dansguardian detects "Myspace" in the html page configured by its list Phrase 'gotchas' and blocks the page and sends back a blocked page warning. But becuase of that there also great demand to figure how to unblock websites that these filters block.

 

"Anonymous" Proxies

Lastly we have the most commonly applied use of proxy servers. To route your request threw an intermediate server to be anonymous. There are several type of these proxy servers. There are Web proxy sites, using PHP or CGI software on a server like Freesslproxy.com. Then there are your good Socks5 or HTTP proxies. If your looking for list of  new proxy sites, you can find them here at this site on the front page.

We also wrote a greate guide to setup a Socks5 proxy with putty.

 

The Bigger Picture.

Regardless what a proxy server does, caching , web filtering or anything. They have one common purpose. To intercept your traffic, and route traffic on your behalf. Ironically enough, people use anonymous proxy servers to bypass Filter proxy servers. There really not much difference between the different types of proxies. But there are different Protocols that proxy servers can use such as HTTP, Socks4 and Socks5, and POP3. But the end result is the same.

The Diagram below shows how to imagine a proxy server.

 

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