A Few Questions Relating to WinGate's Features

[StephanBotha]

Hi!

I haven't used WinGate in a long time and I have pretty much forgotten everything about it. I would like to buy it again, but before I do that, I have some questions. Perhaps you fellows can answer them for me.

Currently, at my office, I have people browsing heavy bandwidth websites and it's eating up our production. I would like to block this in the office (for instance www.miniclip.com). If I set my gateway to my server with WinGate installed, will WinGate be able to block these sites from being accessed?

As well as blocking sites, is it possible to assign x amount of bandwidth per user in my network? If they want to access the internet, they have to use a user/passw and I can allocate 500mb per person per month, or depending on the users, different amounts of bandwidth per user/group?

I would also like to be able to see a log of websites visited per user (not IP, as we have dynamic IP in the office).

These are the most important things I need WinGate to take care of.

Thanks in advance!

Stephan

[jasona]

Hi Stephan,

----------------------
Currently, at my office, I have people browsing heavy bandwidth websites and it's eating up our production. I would like to block this in the office (for instance www.miniclip.com). If I set my gateway to my server with WinGate installed, will WinGate be able to block these sites from being accessed?
-----------------------
WinGate can do this, probably the easiest way would be to intercept port 80 connections into the www proxy then use policies to block unwanted sites.

------------------
As well as blocking sites, is it possible to assign x amount of bandwidth per user in my network? If they want to access the internet, they have to use a user/passw and I can allocate 500mb per person per month, or depending on the users, different amounts of bandwidth per user/group?
-------------------
WinGate can also do this, you can configure a policy to also check against certain data measures such as the total data the client has recieved.


-----------------
I would also like to be able to see a log of websites visited per user (not IP, as we have dynamic IP in the office).
------------------
As long as you are authenticating users then the username will be shown in the log files. WinGate’s log files are located in C:\Program Files\WinGate\Logs and are ordered by service, for example you'll find the WWW proxy service log in C:\Program Files\WinGate\Logs\WWW Proxy Service.

The current log file is named after the service, any older log files that have been rolled over are named for the date that they were rolled over.

The data in the log files follows a fairly standard format, for example:

12/20/07 14:12:49 127.0.0.1 Guest 0000000003 Requested: http://www.wingate.com/
12/20/07 14:12:49 127.0.0.1 Guest 0000000003 Traffic 14515 469 409 14509 0s

The columns are as follows:

Date 12/20/07
Time 14:12:49
IP Address 127.0.0.1
Username Guest
Session number 0000000003
Event Traffic
Bytes sent to client 14515
Bytes received from client 469
Bytes sent for client 409
Bytes received for client 14509
Duration of session 0s

Admittedly these aren’t the easiest to decipher as it is very data intensive, quite a few of our users utilize a third party analyser.

Proxy Inspector for WinGate: http://www.advsoft.info/en/download/
Saw Mill: http://www.sawmill.net/
Internet Access Monitor: http://www.internetaccessmonitor.com/

You might want to take a look at the following post http://forums.qbik.com/viewtopic.php?p=28522#28522

[StephanBotha]

Excellent! Thanks a lot! I will be making my purchase immediately!

[StephanBotha]

Which version of WinGate would I need for this? Standard, Pro or Enterprise?

[jasona]

From how you have described your needs a standard license should be enough. The features of each license type is available here:

http://www.wingate.com/products/wingate/licensing.php

I would recommend you activate a free 30 day trial license to start with.

[StephanBotha]

Thanks, I did see that, but I am unable to find the info that I am looking for.

The comparison is not very clear about the following points:

Remote GateKeeper access
Bandwidth control

Won't I need this to do the above mentioned features?

[StephanBotha]

I took your advice and downloaded the trial. There were no options to download a 64 bit version. When I installed it, it wanted to install it to the 32 bit program files location. How do I go about getting the 64 bit version?

[adrien]

HI

the program is a 32 bit application (service). It has a 64 bit network driver which allows it to work on 64 bit OSes.

Regards

Adrien