Discuss how the process of obtaining Web information occurs when clients are configured to use a proxy server.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When clients are configured to use a proxy server, they send their requests to the proxy server instead of the actual target web server. The proxy makes a request to the actual server on behalf of the client and forwards the data to the client. In most cases, the proxy saves the requested data and uses this data when another client has the same request. This is called caching.
Not all content that is transferred over HTTP is suitable for caching. Pages that are generated by a script or that are personalized for the user viewing the page are usually not cached. Therefore, a web server response usually contains the header fields Pragma and Cache-Control, which determine if a page can be cached. HTTP requests from clients can contain header fields that tell a proxy to not deliver data from its cache but to fetch the data from the target web server.
With its clients, Squid speaks only HTTP. However, it is possible to encapsulate other protocols such as FTP or GOPHER into HTTP requests. Squid can handle these requests and connect to the target servers in their native protocol. Because of this feature, Squid is sometimes also called an FTP proxy. This is incorrect, because all FTP requests need to be encapsulated into HTTP by the browser.
As a caching proxy server, Squid is used as a gateway to connect an internal network to the Internet. On one side Squid works as a firewall, separating the internal and the external network. On the other side, Squid caches the transferred data and reduces the load on the Internet connection.