If you've ever accessed the Internet from an office environment, chances are your communications passed through a proxy. In the next few articles, I'll discuss the advantages of using a proxy and demonstrate the configuration of several proxies available from FreeBSD's ports collection.

You may not already kmow what a proxy does. Take a moment and go to http://www.freebsd.org/ports/, and in the "Search for:" box type in the word "proxy". You may be surprised at the number of proxies available, perhaps even a bit dismayed by all of the terms found in the descriptions: reverse proxy, arp proxy, transparent proxy, etc. Bear with me while I go through the most common proxy terms. Then we can start making sense of the terminology by looking at concrete examples.

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