Pre sales questions

[Ronster]

Hello,

I am thinking of either getting a hardware device such as the D-link 1100 or the SonicWall 3060. But now that I've taken a look at WinGate I have a few questions.

1. Our T1 line comes into the building and connects to a router, do I bypass the router and connect our WinGate PC directly to the internet connection? What if I get cable internet as a backup internet port, does it support load balancing? I guess I'm looking for WAN ports.

2. Can I set it to filter specific files from being downoaded? What about wildcards (*.mp3)?

3. When I set up the HTTP proxy, can the client stations using DHCP need any additional setup or can the gateway address provided by the built in DHCP server take care of this?

If you have any additional helpful hints please send them along, I am running a network with Macs, PCs, Unix boxes, mail server, several FTP servers and using PCAnywhere to remotely manage servers here.

Thanks.

[adrien]

Hi

1. If you have a router, with existing configuration for packet filtering and blocking, there is no particular reason to bypass it and connect WinGate directly to the external link. This would then continue to provide protection to the WinGate server if ever WinGate is turned off. WinGate 5.x supports connection round-robining, but it is not ideal, and in fact we are working on a better scheme which will bypass routing for outbound connections.

2. Yes you can, and you can do wildcards, but not in that format. The way to block all mp3 files would be to block all resources containing .mp3, or ending in .mp3

3. If you use WinGate's DHCP server, it will by default (unless you modify the DHCP configuration) assign itself as the default gateway for the network. If you then wish your client machines to be forced through the WWW Proxy for security or access control reasons, there are 2 options.

a) get your web browsers to use proxy auto detection "automatically detect proxy settings". This will provide better HTTP proxy authentication options.

b) simply use connection interception (in older versions called Transparent redirection, and in other products often called transparent proxy) to funnel HTTP connections through the proxy.

Hope this helps

Adrien