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Thursday, February 4, 2010

Basics of Networking - Part 3 (Internet through Proxy)

Hurray.... My network is UP........
Hurray.... My Router shares the internet connection.......

Do I need a Proxy?
A good point that makes us to think. Do we need a proxy? When the router shares the internet. Why do we need a proxy?

If the ADSL modem is our router. We need to think about proxy based on our network size. Sharing about hard learning, we felt the router was extremely good to share internet connection acting as a gateway. But when the network size started to grow we faced frequent network connection drops.... Why?

The ADSL Router was not good enough to handle the too many requests from different machines. May be this is not the case for all the routers but our router did this to us (The router is a least version provided by the ISP, not designed for high traffic).

Whats up next?
Let the internet connection be bridged. Let the PC take up the load....
Let the PC take up the Proxy......


Yes. We are to the topic now.......... Let us know about proxies to get internet shared in the network.

What is a Proxy?
To keep it short. It is an application that acts a layer in between our application (browser) and the web server.

Let us understand the network now.
All the PCs are in same sub-net
PC - A - 192.168.1.1
Laptop - 192.168.1.2
PC - C - 192.168.1.3

Gateway for all should be 192.168.1.1 (PC A, should not have a gateway)

The PC A is running on Windows.........
It has two NIC (Network Interface Card). The first one connects to the ADSL router for Internet connection using the bridging option. The second one now connects to the local network with the IP 192.168.1.1

To make the internet connection simple, use AnalogX Proxy.
Download and install it. When we run it... We see it runs on a Port 6588.

Yes it listens on 6588 Port on 192.168.1.1
We need to say this in our browsers and other internet accessing application like GTalk, Skype, Yahoo Chat and more

Click here to know on how to configure your browser.

Do we need to go only with AnalogX?
No not at all.....
We have too many proxy software with very advanced operations.

Are you having a SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) Network?
Wanted more than a normal proxy?
Still wanted the NAT(Network Address Translation) Feature of the ADSL router with a PC as a gateway?
Wanted more features of Proxy, Firewall and Advanced gateway?

The answer would be, try IPCop-Linux........

When the network grows..... Want too many things to do for internet?
Keep watching..... We will see, how to load balance internet connectivity with multiple Internet connections and multiple proxy servers. There are more to come, for now will go with basics in the network.

1 comment:

Karikalan said...

Good approach boss, like the image and the part by part approach. It is being told in a neat and clean way, even a novice can understand. That is the way to go.

Small suggestion, improve the paragraphing, aligning and punctuation. It will do good.

Also, an another idea would be to teach things by telling a story. The technical message should be blended with the story, I know you are good at it, give it a try.