A quick instruction guide to setup your own private proxy server. This guide is meant for home users as opposed to industrial strength proxy setups.
What is a Proxy Server?
In Computer networks, a proxy server is an application or firmware, which means both hardware and software, that communicates between a network and a client machine. The proxy server inspects the data or packets sent by a network. Because of broadband connections and millions of computers accessing the world wide web everyday, the threat of harmful data being sent to client computers from individuals has increased. A way to surf the internet safe and secure is to set a free proxy server to monitor packets being sent form the internet. it is a server (a computer system or an application) which acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. most proxies today are web proxies that help to provide access to content on the World Wide Web.
The diagram above shows communication between two computers (in grey color)
A forward proxy forwarding requests from a network to the Internet.
An open proxy forwarding requests to and fro anywhere on the Internet.
A reverse proxy forwarding requests from internet back to the servers in an internal network
The popular Win Proxy, is a windows based software that will guide you through setting up a free proxy server for home use.
After you’ve downloaded Win Proxy, you need to run the installation file, and follow the wizard. One important question you’ll need to understand when going through the wizard is if you want to install Win Proxy as a service or a normal application. If you currently have Windows NT, then the best choice would be to choose normal application.
The steps to install Win Proxy on your computer are fairly easy and shouldn’t be much of a hassle. After you’ve completed the setup, run Win Proxy and the server should be up and running.
As Win Proxy is already configured to act as a proxy server for your network, you are only left to tweak some settings to use the caching options, to do this you will have to inform your current browser to use Win Proxy.
For people using the Firefox browser:
Step 1: Click the tools menu, then select the options link and under the advanced options, choose the network tab
Step 2: Click Settings
Win Proxy automatically installs set of default options that are decent for many users, although if you want to modify it, to get a lot more performance. First launch your web browser from a computer located on the network, then point it to http://PROXY_MACHINE:3129, PROXY_MACHINE is the IP address of the computer hosting the proxy server.
After doing this, you will see the browser based configuration panel for Win Proxy. The casual user may not want to adjust any settings, but it comes in handy if you have specific security needs.
Win Proxy comes with multiple features for the advanced user to set up through the administration panel.
There are also setting that will allow you to provide access to only certain websites or not allow access to some websites and even individuals by setting up accounts for all users.
Keep in mind, that Win Proxy isn’t recommended for a business, or an orginization, but it gets the job done for home users. If you want a more powerful solution, Freeproxy and 3proxy are two highly recommended proxy server software choices.
Tags: Free Proxy Server, Freeproxy, WinproxySource : techtalkafrica[dot]com
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