Lans and Proxy Servers
Does anyone have a strong opinion as to the best one to use?
wingate.net
winproxy.com
sygate.com
nevod.com
Posts from another thread: exchange2000.com ------------------------------------------------------------- From: +Mike Schoonmaker I have used 3 of the 4 you mentioned...
my take is this...
WinGate - seems to be the most widely used, and has EXCELLENT support discussion boards at their site. MOST related problems will find answers there, though sometimes the answer is "can't be done". Very capable product, and (likely) the most configurable of the bunch (that I've tested). OTOH, there is NO Factory support for the lite version of the product.
WinProxy - Used this for a short time.. had no real problems with this, but the lack of support structure like WinGate has, makes troubleshooting that much more difficult. HOWEVER... they DO have technical support available to all, where as Wingate does not have any (for the lite product).
Sygate - not actually a proxy server, but a NAT (Network Address Translator). I found this product to be virtually invisible to all software, which is a VERY nice feature! EVEN worked with iChat ActiveX chat client without a hitch (neither of the others would). Their demo version is kinda crippled, it does allow trial, but requests/receives the packets in sequential fashion until one purchases the product license key. What this means is, If you're trying out on (2) machines, the first machine making a request gets ALL of the bandwidth... the secondary machine must WAIT for no activity, before that request is processed. After a timeout period, the secondary machine gains "control", and the first machine must wait for a similar timeout period before getting anymore access. The people at SyGate say that this does NOT occur in the licensed version. Two downsides to Sygate for me... 1) can't restrict access to certain sites/addresses/ports (got to keep daughter off of the IRC channels), and 2) no NT version available for trial. If blocking access is not a problem for you, I thing SyGate offers the most invisible product.
Nevod - have not tested
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Another Post from Mike Shoonmaker:
Have tried WinProxy, WinGate, a few others...
The most successful at getting everything to work was SyGate (www.sygate.com) which is a Network Address Translator (NAT), INCLUDING iChat.
They also offer a trial product. Although you can connect 2 or more for the trial product, the trial is limited to sequential access where the computers must wait their turn for net access. I'm told that this is NOT the case with the registered product.
Furthermore, found an EXCELLENT resource for proxies, NAT's, etc, try
carol.wins.uva.nl
------------------------------------------------------------------- From Largo:
have 3 PC's connected on a Lantastic 7.0 network ($240 for software and 3 NIC cards) running Win 95. I tried to get Win 95's Direct cable connection to work with no success over the serial ports before I coughed up the cash for the real network.
I have a Roadrunner Cable modem (27mbs theoretical on their end limited to the 10mbs of the ethernet card that the cable modem connects to. The whole throughput is shared among 100 maximum users so if everyone was downloading at the same time throughput would be on the order of ISDN at the worst.
Actual throughput as an example is 14 MB internet explorer download took 15-20 seconds.
I have Lantastic iShare 2.5 running to share the cable modem with all the PC's. You can get a copy of the corporate 30 day demo version to try it out for free.
artisoft.com for product description. cybercity.dk for demo program
I had unbelievable problems with Lantastic Internet Gateway which comes with Lantastic 7.0 until I found out that it doesn't support Internet Explorer 3.0+ (who would have guessed!).
I haven't had the system configured this way for long so I don't know what kind of problems I may have in the future. So far the only problem I have had is with winsock.dll which was updated by a Microsoft Dial Up Networking upgrade and iShare won't work with it. I backleveled it and it worked fine.
S.W. |