On Saturday 14 December 2002 08:41, John Nall uttered: > Looking up the definition of a "proxy" it seems to be a machine that sits > between my terminal and the Internet. Very well. My terminal runs RH8.0, > and I have an XP machine which is on the same LAN. The XP machine dials > the ISP to access the Internet, and once it has a connection then I can > also access it from the Linux machine. It would seem, then, that by > definition the XP machine is a proxy. That is a very loose def. of a proxy. > But Mozilla edit-->preferences-->advanced-->proxies does not show anything > that indicates that. It seems to indicate that the Linux machine has a > direct connection to the internet. > > So do I have a proxy?? If so, how do I find out what the "port" for it is? No, you don't have a proxy. Most likely your XP machine is providing NAT services, Network Address Translation. It's taking your private IP address from the LAN, translating it to the shared public IP address you have for external communication, and back again when the data returns. In this manner, your XP machine is acting as a Gateway to the internet, not a proxy. A proxy is more of a services that sends/receives data from the net for you, but without translating your IP address. Proxys can also cache data locally, so that when you request a site that hasn't changed, you get fed locally cached data, which can be much quicker than going out and getting the data again, especially if this is the first time you at this station view the site. EG: Fred on stationb goes out and looks at a website that has a huge amount of pictures and what not. Takes him a while to get all of it loaded down, but since local machines cache content, he can load it pretty quick now. He wants to share this with you, so you go to load it on stationa. You expect to wait just as long as Fred did, but instead, since your proxy cached the content, you get it all as fast as the proxy machine can give it to you, instead of transferring it all over the Internet. Anywho, thats probably a bit more than you were looking for, but bottom line, no, you aren't using a proxy. -- Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE For Web Services and Linux Consulting, Visit --> j2Solutions.net Mondo DevTeam (www.mondorescue.org) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
