PCFormat Forum Archive

I have been asked to find out what the best proxy server is?

Seeing as I know nothing about the subject, I thought I'd ask you.

Which one to go for?

the pink one!... especially if it has pictures of elf-boobs/freakishly muscled men with over-sized swords!

or you could look at squid

nuke will probably be along soon with some plug-n-pray ironport devices....

depending on your user base, be prepared to put some work into this... you may also want to spend some time deciding on a reporting portal, (like cyberoam iView)

I need it to sparkle.

Fortunately I don't have to worry about arcane stuff like user bases or reporting portals as our system administrator
will be doing the legwork. He did however tell me to find him a proxy server.

/EDIT

Oh....my bad.
What he wants is a replacement for something called CensorNet. He said something about proxy servers,
and I may have got the two muddled up.

If you want a good [H]ardware based solution, i'd recommend Watchguard any day - their Firebox systems are beautiful, and seem to be along the lines of what you want to replace they have MultiWan etc etc as well.
We use it here at work with our Vox Fishbone network, 4x10MB lines, and it does the filtering

Thanks Anthro

Cyberoam's products looks really good to me, one of our clients installed one. It's really fast(the web interface) and reporting is very nice and easy to understand. You can also integrate it with with your domain.
Squid is harder to set up, but you can do almost anything on it. There is a lot of reporting tools available for it. But it can take long to get it exactly as you want.
You can also use a Cisco router to do the filtering on url. Not really a proxy, but it has some layer 7 filtering functions that does the same thing. It has no caching though.(for that you will need a cache engine you connect to with WCCP. Either one from Cisco or even Squid).