Proxy

The Proxy Server on the IT-100 provides two specific services; it caches websites that users on your network have previously visited and it can allow or deny access to specific websites. Proxy acts as an intermediary program between your network users and websites on the Internet. When a user accesses a site and views a webpage, the webpage is cached or stored on the proxy server. The next time a user accesses the same page, they view the one locally stored on the IT-100 without going out to the Internet. This saves download time and network bandwidth since the user is only accessing the IT-100 on the LAN. If that user attempts to access a site they haven't visited before, their request is passed through the Proxy Server and out to the Internet.

Proxy is also used to either allow users on your network to access all websites except those you block, or to block all websites except those you allow. You can use this feature of Proxy if you want to control which websites can be viewed by users on the network.

The IT-100 uses Transparent Proxy. Typically, when a Proxy Server is installed on a network, the web browsers on each computer must be configured by hand to use that proxy server. Transparent Proxy is a process that "forces" all users on the network to go through proxy to access the Internet without any need to configure their computers. Since all web requests to the Internet must first be processed by the Proxy Server if it is enabled, access to the web will take slightly longer and require more resources on the IT-100 to run.