Internet Connection
Sharing Made Simple
Connect Your Entire LAN to the Internet with a Single IP Address Simply and Securely. If you want to connect a local area network (LAN) in your office to the Internet today, you have a number of options to choose from. The simplest is to buy a small stand-alone router or gateway. These devices are inexpensive, reliable and mostly plug-and-play. If you know what you’re doing, you can configure a router and network in less than an hour. However, this might not be your best choice. There are significant reasons why a router is not the best solution. How secure does your data need to be? Do you need (or would like) to know exactly how much Internet traffic each of your PCs consumes? Do you have priority traffic that must get through? Do you have employees that might be using the Internet for purposes other than work? A simple hardware gateway will not satisfy these conditions. You could invest a small fortune for a sophisticated device that would satisfy some of these and still not have the optimum solution. An alternative to expensive hardware is setting up a dedicated computer to control Internet access and connectivity. In this case, your choice is economically limited to one of two platforms: *nix or Windows. While *nix (Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) is technically terrific for the task, it is not as cost effective in a typical company with a multitude of Windows PCs. A *nix system bears a very important drawback: you will either have to hire a system administrator to manage it, or be unable to fine-tune Internet access and constantly risk network failure. Using a dedicated Windows PC to control how your LAN users access the Internet is the only remaining choice. While Windows itself provides a limited set of basic connectivity features, you will need to purchase and set up dedicated gateway server software to use advanced features. UserGate 4.1 by Entensys is a proxy server for Windows that is not only the simplest gateway server to configure and use, but also has all the advanced features your company may require... more>>>