Web Proxy Servers (Web Infrastructure Series) - Softcover

Luotonen, Ari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0136806120 ISBN 13: 9780136806127

Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr, 1997

Synopsis

A proxy is a specialized Web server which operates on or behind a firewall, which makes more efficient use of network bandwidth and offers improved network security. This is the first book on proxy server technology (from setup to tuning tricks) written by one of the developers of the technology.

About this title

About the Author

ARI LUOTONEN is Chief Architect of the Netscape Proxy Server. At CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, he headed server development and was co-developer of the first Web proxy server, the CERN Proxy.

From the Back Cover

Make the most of your proxy servers!

Proxy servers are critical to the success of virtually every large Web and intranet site. But managing and optimizing them has always been a black art—until now. In Web Proxy Servers, the co-developer of the first proxy server, the CERN Proxy, explains the technology in depth—and shows how to optimize any proxy server in any environment.

Understand the basic architecture of proxy servers, and compare firewall proxy servers, departmental, personal and specialized proxies. Discover how proxy servers handle every major Internet protocol, including HTTP, FTP, Gopher, News, SSL, WAIS, Telnet and LDAP. Learn how to implement filtering by URLs or PICS content ratings. Review proxy server caching in unprecedented depth, including:

• Guaranteeing the freshness of cached documents
• Measuring and optimizing cache “hit ratios”
• On-demand and on-command caching
• Web-based advertising

Discover the best proxy security solutions, including encryption and authentication. Compare proxy server configuration for Web sites, intranets, extranets, and “DNS-deprived” environments. Get troubleshooting tips and sample auto-configuration scripts. Learn all you need to know to maximize performance, including:

• Estimating loads, establishing proxy hierarchies, choosing hardware and software
• Balancing loads with Round-Robin DNS, hash-function based proxy selection, CARP, ICP, and other methods
• Using reverse proxying effectively

Web Proxy Servers is a must-have resource for all Web and intranet administrators who care about performance and security.

From the Inside Flap

Preface
Thanks, Ari. You're a fountain of information as usual.
Gregg Ulrich

During the four years that I have worked on the fast-evolving World Wide Web technology—specifically proxy servers—I have felt uneasy about the fact that no one has really had time to produce good documentation that would provide true insight and understanding of this great technology. We engineers who understand how things work are often just too busy to explain them to others. After all, an Internet year is just 52 days long, and the average release cycle tends to be less than nine (Earth) months. So many new features, so little time.
I've always taken great pride in promptly answering all the E-mail that I get. But there have been times when I have been completely overwhelmed by the number of messages and the span of questions that I have received. And I've realized that I have explained the same things over and over again in E-mail. If only there were a book that covered all these issues, people could just read it and receive the same answer I would give them anyway—and maybe learn a bit more and gain depth in their understanding about how things work, and why they work like that.
So one day I got an E-mail from Mary Franz at Prentice Hall asking if I'd be interesting in writing a book on Web proxy servers. Well, not being able to say "no" to more work, I said yes, sure, might as well. I have always found working on the Web to be rewarding. It's great to receive messages from the Internet, thanking and praising my efforts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0136806120
• ISBN 13: 9780136806127
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 431