On Friday, July 6, 2001, at 10:43 PM, Sionnach Aisling wrote:
> I've read the FAQ section regarding transfering files
> from pee cee to Mac, however, I want to set at least
> one of my Macs up for web browsing and email... I am
> currently hooked up to the net via cable modem from my
> main pee cee. That pee cee is running a proxy server
> to share the connection with a few laptops I have
> kicking around. Can I simply assign one of the Macs
> an IP address and connect it to the hub? If I assign
> it a gateway IP to the proxy server (I'm assuming I
> need to do this... again, forgive me, I come from a
> pee cee world) will it send network traffic as it
> should to that address and so on, or will a conflict
> of some kind pop up since the proxy server is pee cee
> based? Perhaps I should put in a router and share the
> connection that way??? What do you all think?
> Sionnach
Sionnach:
Your on the right track, but a little confused between what a router
does and what a proxy server does.
The proxy server takes requests for web pages (sometimes other ports
too, but usually just web traffic) from clients, such as your compact
Mac, and then asks the internet for the page. When the page comes back
to the server, it then forwards the page to the Mac. A big advantage to
using proxies is that they offer better security than having all of your
machines exposed on the internet, and they can offer a shared cache of
web pages.
Let's say that you are on small network where almost everyone goes to
essentially the same sites. If you surf a web page that the proxy
server has already gotten for someone else, it will check to see if
there have been any updates, and if not, it will send you a copy of the
one that it got earlier. Much like the way a web browser has a cache to
speed things up.
To use a proxy server, your software has to allow a proxy. Web browsers
have preferences where you give it the name or IP address of the proxy.
The Mac OS doesn't care about proxies. (Windows setups have a proxy
client too, that overrides the OS to direct as much traffic as possible
to the proxy server. The Mac OS doesn't.)
A router, on the other hand, takes whatever it is that you are asking
for, a web page or file, and changes the basic IP traffic to make it
look like the router is asking for the files or pages. When the traffic
comes back, the router modifies it again, to send it to the machine that
actually asked for it. You configure your Mac to use the router by
telling the MacOS to use the router's IP address as a gateway.
Routers, typically, don't care what you are asking for, they are only
moving traffic from one network to another, they are routing traffic.
What does all of this mean? Well, I'd use a router for better
compatibility with many different apps (instant messaging, napster type
file exchanges, etc) and you don't have to worry about configuring all
the different apps, only the gateway IP address.
HTH and sorry for the long post everyone.
---
Kelly D. Jones
http://www.geocities.com/kdjones74 <-- My computer museum
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