Re: Reverse proxy ??

[Brad Van Orden <Brad.VanOrden () netisi com>]

Eric Toll wrote:
> I feel no one has clearly said what a Reverse Proxy is.
>
> Proxy: is a entity which takes client requests,
> goes and gets it on the net and saves it to its disk, (in case anyone else wants the same item - caching)
> then serves it up to the client.  (FTP, WWW, etc)
>
> Reverse Proxy:   Gee wilickers I've got 200+ users going out to a large web site all the time.  I know
> what to do, I'll cache the whole site  and I'll tell the proxy server (on my users behalf) to
> go out and start copying the whole entire site at midnight, tell it not to expire for 4 days, and save all this
> info to the proxy servers disk array.  Now when everyone starts hitting this particular site,  the content
> is served up via high speed local net, instead of going out across the internet connection.

These definitions appear to be the same thing to me.  A reverse proxy is one a provider puts in front
of his/her own web servers.  The idea is to have multiple web servers and the reverse proxy distributes
the load among them.  This gains you bandwidth and high availability.  It is transparent to the person
doing the browsing.

Regards,

Brad Van Orden
Net InfraStructure, Inc