Drawbacks With Proxy Servers

The proxy server is, above all, a security device. Using it to increase internet access with limited IP addresses will have many drawbacks. A proxy server will allow greater access from inside the protected network to the outside, but will keep the inside completely inaccessible from the outside. This means no servers, talk or archive connections, or direct mailing to the inside computers. These drawbacks might seem slight, but think of it this way:

• You have left a report you are doing on your computer inside a firewall protected network. You are at home, and decide that you would like to go over it. You can not. You can not reach your computer because it is behind the firewall. You try to log into firewall first, but since everyone has proxy server access, no one has set up an account for you on it.

• Your daughter goes to college. You want to email her. You have some private things to talk about, and would rather have your mail sent directly to your machine. You trust your systems administrator completely, but still, this is private mail.

• The inability to use UDP packets represents a big drawback with the proxy servers. I imagine UDP capabilities will be coming shortly.

FTP causes another problem with a proxy server. When getting or doing an ls, the FTP server opens a socket on the client machine and sends the information through it. A proxy server will not allow this, so FTP doesn't particularly work.

And, proxy servers run slow. Because of the greater overhead, almost any other means of getting this access will be faster.

Basically, if you have the IP addresses, and you are not worried about security, do not use a firewall and/or proxy servers. If you do not have the IP addresses, but you are also not worried about security, you might also want to look into using an IP emulator, like Term, Slirp or TIA. Term is available from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu, Slirp is available from ftp://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/pub/slirp, and TIA is available from marketplace.com. These packages will run faster, allow better connections, and provide a greater level of access to the inside network from the internet. Proxy servers are good for those networks which have a lot of hosts that will want to connect to the internet on the fly, with one setup and little work after that.