Hardware Based Proxy Servers Vs Software Based Proxy Servers [closed]

Question

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 8 years ago.

Improve this question

I am doing some sourcing and have just realized that I am having trouble googling out any meaningful results on Hardware based HTTP Proxy Servers. It got me thinking whether there are any good Hardware based Proxy Servers for Office and/or Home use.

My Questions is which are the known good Hardware Based HTTP Proxy Servers in production today and secondly what are the pros and cons of using a Hardware based HTTP Proxy Server as opposed to a Software Based HTTP Proxy?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as a "Hardware based Proxy Servers". They are all hardware and software based

Mostly the ones marketed as "Hardware based Proxy Servers" are just low end x86 computers running some variant of Linux

You therefore tend to pay a premium for the pretty red paint job :-)

Answer 2

I'm not aware of a hardware-based web proxy. Even if they do exist, I can't see why one would prefer such a setup over Squid.

Answer 3

I assume that when you say "hardware-based" proxy server you're talking about some kind of network appliance. I'd wonder first if the appliance is just running Apache httpd on BSD or Linux anyway, so I wonder if there would be any real difference.

Answer 4

I have a Mikrotik RB450G in our office and running transparent proxy, failover mechanism and a good firewall, for about 100 of users is doing a pretty good job. It's a good solution

Answer 5

Try Mikrotik based router-boards. They are cheap ( under $50US for a basic board ) and have a built in web proxy server. You can even run them as a transparent proxy server.