proxy servers

[Guinness1]

Hi new to the board...and not a techi so bear with my ignorance. I was using a stat tracker from a blog site i use because I was curious about how it said it could track down ip addresses of people who have visited my site. I'm not really interested in this..I really don't care who visits, but was intrigued on how it worked? So I logged in as a visiter from my computer at work and the ip address given gave the correct city but the actual ip numbers were different than that of my computer. Why is that? This led to a discussion with a co-worker about proxy serversand anonymous surfing. How do they work? Do they work?

 

[pctechmike1]

To answer your question bluntly, yes, proxy servers do work. You are more than likely not using one at all. The reason your IP address is different on the site is because that is what is known as your WAN (Wide Area Network) address. You're private IP address is different. Go to www.whatismyip.com and see if it's saying the same address.

Proxies are designed to speed up the Internet in a sense, as they "cache" the Web sites you visit, for faster viewing later. When you go to a Website through a proxy server, it downloads that site to it, then to your computer. The next time you go to the same site, all it downloads is what has changed since the last time you went there. Proxies also can hide your IP address, if you want to stay unknown. For more info, check this out: http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/proxyservers/a/proxyservers.htm