Your Own Proxy Server
By Al Williams
Today's workplace is a lot more litigious than it used to be. If you snoop on employees, you might be sued. Then again, you also might be sued if one employee exposes another to offensive material. Beyond the legal issues, monitoring employees raises a number of controversial moral issues. It seems like it's a no-win situation.
While you can't control everything employees see, you can use a proxy server to control what they access on the Internet while they're at work. For example, proxy servers can block access to certain types of Web-site content or even to specific Web sites.
But legal monitoring is just the tip of the iceberg. Essentially, a proxy server acts as an intermediary between a browser and a Web server to process requests the way you want it to. Proxy servers let you perform all kinds of processing on browser requests—processing that's both benign and a bit Orwellian. It can filter out things like advertisements, referrer strings, and cookies, or prefetch and cache Web pages to make dial-up connections faster. Proxy servers can also regulate throughput and track Web access.
Foundations
Regardless of how you decide to use them, proxy servers work like this to monitor HTTP traffic:
Step 1. An internal Web browser sends a request to the proxy server, which resides on a firewall or gateway computer. The first line of the request contains the desired URL.
Step 2. The proxy server reads, then retrieves the URL and forwards the request to the appropriate destination.<>
