They are also popular tools among private users – as are the millions of adblockers based on the same principle. WebProxy and other HTTP filters have enjoyed great popularity for many years – probably because they are comparatively simple to use. The design of the NxFilter user interface can also be customized. For example, companies can use NxFilter to generate their own cloud filter service for paid users. Basically, the developers grant their users extensive rights. Companies, public institutions, and private persons can use the tool. NxFilter is available under a freeware license. Figure 1 illustrates the differences between unfiltered and filtered DNS queries.įigure 1: Comparison of unfiltered (top) and filtered (bottom) DNS traffic. Ideally, the cache provides the responses, which results in a significant reduction of network traffic.
If you operate a local DNS filter, the local DNS server serves the queries. Assuming a corporate network uses the Internet provider's DNS servers, the DNS queries have to be sent to these servers, and the network clients have to wait for a response. The reason for the performance gain is the local cache that NxFilter uses and manages for DNS lookups. The news gets better: Experience reports indicate that the use of NxFilter has a positive effect on the Internet connection of all the network clients. Because the DNS protocol is used, the data traffic does not have to pass through a special filter – thus eliminating latency problems. In essence, NxFilter is a forwarding DNS server with a filter function. NxFilter is a freeware DNS filter that can compete with commercial products in terms of functionality and performance. This limitation can be solved with the help of a DNS filter, which can monitor all the traffic, regardless of the protocol used to send or receive data. However, latency is not the only problem: Proxy servers primarily specialize in filtering HTTP connections. These latency problems grow with the number of users. The use of such filters, often employing the Squid proxy server and similar tools, leads in practice to serious latency problems on the network because the proxy server analyzes and filters the web traffic and thus becomes a bottleneck. Web filters that are based on the HTTP proxy server principle are part of the standard toolkit for protecting corporate networks.
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