Книга: Iptables Tutorial 1.2.2

How to place proxies

How to place proxies

Proxies are a general problem when it comes to NAT in most cases unfortunately, especially transparent proxies. Normal proxies should not cause too much trouble, but creating a transparent proxy is a dog to get to work, especially on larger networks. The first problem is that proxies take quite a lot of processing power, just the same as NAT does. To put both of these on the same machine is not advisable if you are going to handle large network traffic. The second problem is that if you NAT the source IP as well as the destination IP, the proxy will not be able to know what hosts to contact. E.g., which server is the client trying to contact? Since all that information is lost during the NAT translation since the packets can't contain that information as well if they are NAT'ed, it's a problem. Locally, this has been solved by adding the information in the internal data structures that are created for the packets, and hence proxies such as squid can get the information.

As you can see, the problem is that you don't have much of a choice if you are going to run a transparent proxy. There are, of course, possibilities, but they are not advisable really. One possibility is to create a proxy outside the firewall and create a routing entry that routes all web traffic through that machine, and then locally on the proxy machine NAT the packets to the proper ports for the proxy. This way, the information is preserved all the way to the proxy machine and is still available on it.

The second possibility is to simply create a proxy outside the firewall, and then block all webtraffic except the traffic going to the proxy. This way, you will force all users to actually use the proxy. It's a crude way of doing it, but it will hopefully work.

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