Introduction

For enterprise customers it is important to be able to set up secure computing environments within their companies, and proxy configuration is an essential part of doing that. Proxy configuration acts as a security barrier; it ensures that the proxy server monitors all traffic between the Internet and the intranet. This is normally an integral part of security enforcement in corporate firewalls within intranets. Enterprise customers who want to use Java Plug-in to deploy applets on their intranet web pages may also set up proxy support. This support is required for Java Plug-in to work in an intranet environment and can be set up through the Java Plug-in Control Panel.

The Control Panel provides three proxy options:

• "Use browser settings"

• Manual configuration through the Protocol-Address-Port table

• "Automatic proxy configuration URL"

If "Use browser settings" is selected, then proxy information is entered entirely through the browser. For Internet Explorer, go to Tools>Internet Options ... and select the Connections tab and then LAN Settings ... ; for Netscape, go to Edit>Preferences ... and select Advanced under Category and then Proxies. How this works and the three types of connections that can be set up through the browser-Direct, Manual, and Automatic-are described in the following sections.

If you select manual configuration in the Control Panel, then you must enter in the table for each protocol the address and port for the proxy server. Note that you may select to exclude some hosts from requiring proxy servers by listing them in the field labeled "No proxy host".

If you select "Automatic proxy configuration URL", then you must enter the URL for the location of the JavaScript called FindProxyForURL(URL url) that returns the proxy server to be used for a URL. Support for this script is the same as described below under Automatic Proxy Configuration.