http://www.articlearmies.com Articles posted by Alena Markova. en-us Copyright (c) 2005 ArticleTime.com http://www.articlearmies.com/articles/Computers/share-and-configure-internet-connections-automatically.html Sharing an Internet connection is not a problem with the abundance of solutions available on the market. Windows Internet Connection Sharing, consumer and business grade stand-alone routers and dedicated Unix-based servers can be used to manage Internet connections and share a single outgoing link among multiple users. These solutions, however, do not provide enough flexibility when used in corporate environments. Plagued with stability, reliability, security and management issues, consumer-grade technologies may be offering an easy start but prohibit future development. None of the listed connectivity methods allow traffic shaping, logging of user activities or advanced group or user-based access policies. A business-grade gateway could be used as a plug-and-play yet customizable alternative. However, a device like that would cost a small fortune and still lack any extensibility unless you are willing to invest a large fortune to start with. A dedicated PC-based server is a viable alternative to dedicated network appliances. The market today is dominated by Unix-based solutions, often free ones. While being perfect connectivity solutions based on their paper specs, the Unix-based servers lack easy management and require an experienced network administrator for configuration, patching, security management and even routine maintenance. A Windows server combined with dedicated connection management software provides the better of the two worlds. There is no patching to be done by the network administrator as Windows downloads and installs updates automatically. While Internet Connection Sharing built into many versions of Windows is a great consumer technology, corporate use requires a different solution. UserGate security server provides all necessary features, and is easily configurable, upgradeable and extensible by an ordinary system administrator via a simple graphical user interface. UserGate is easy to configure on the server, and the best part is that it requires zero changes on the side of network users. Thanks to the built-in DHCP server, UserGate configures connections for local hosts within a local area network completely automatically. The DHCP server allows network administrators to configure network parameters such as IP addresses, network masks, default gateways and DNS servers just once on the server side. The local network users will catch up with the changes completely automatically without involving manual adjustments. By using automated DHCP configuration, UserGate makes LAN management easier and with less maintenance. All network settings are configured on the server, without the need to access individual workstations. UserGate distributes Internet connectivity as a NAT server with port mapping, or acts as a caching proxy server. The use of the proxy server offers significant bandwidth savings thanks to the automated caching of content, while increasing average access speed for the LAN users. UserGate is inherently secure, as there is no way for the network users to make an Internet connection bypassing UserGate software. The built-in firewall, advanced filtering rules and built-in anti-virus make your network as secure as ever possible. Not convinced? Try the free evaluation download at: http://www.entensys.com http://www.articlearmies.com/articles/Computers/entensys-campaign-for-education-helps-pupils-easily-access-internet-learning-resources.html Entensys, a leading provider of Internet Sharing and security software, announced the start of their Campaign for Education, which aims to help pupils easily access Internet learning resources. The essence of the campaign is to provide educational institutions with a complete, fully functional, easy-to–use and extremely secure Internet sharing solution at a minimal price, which connects an entire LAN to the Internet through a single IP address, as well as monitors and controls how users access the Internet with advanced access rules and statistics. The Internet is one of the most important and easiest ways to interact and obtain educational resources, but there are several obvious issues that need to be addressed before we open this door to our children. How do we protect pupils from adult or other inappropriate content? How do we secure a school network from virus attacks and intrusions? How can we monitor and control user Internet connections? How can we know exactly how much Internet traffic each computer and/or user consumes? Entensys provides UserGate Internet Security Server, a multifunctional, stable and secure software solution that enables network administrators to set up and easily manage their network users' Internet access. UserGate is easy to install, quick to deploy and simple to manage (it doesn’t require any special knowledge) and it has a clear, intuitive interface. The whole installation, including the settings procedure, takes about 10 minutes. UserGate is not only a very sophisticated Internet connection and proxy server. It now has a built-in dual antivirus core (Panda Software and Kaspersky, both industry leaders), an advanced Authentication Client and includes many other extremely high security capabilities. There are also extensive plans for more security settings in UserGate to make it even more of a multifunctional Internet security server, so you can set it up depending on your network specifics. Within this project, Entensys is focused on providing the strongest possible package of network hardware combined with UserGate Server as a complete network solution for Internet access sharing for German schools. In this effort, Entensys is working with HardwareWelten (http://www.hardwarewelten.de/), the innovative German provider of hardware, which together will supply customized solutions for public schools, boarding-schools and other private educational organizations. Entensys Corporation recognizes the need to provide a special discount to education and to government organizations. UserGate Internet Security Server is deeply discounted to make it affordable to students, teachers, staff and schools, including home schools. Entensys provides educational institutions a 40% discount for UserGate software. For sales enquires, customer service, technical support, or to contact project management, go to  http://www.entensys.com/contactus/ To contact the Entensys partner in Germany, go to info@hardwarewelten.de http://www.articlearmies.com/articles/Computers/enhance-employee-productivity-with-a-dualcore-proxy-server.html Sharing a single Internet connection among multiple users has never been simpler and UserGate also lets untrained people (not System Administrators) limit the Internet connectivity of their employees. With a single external Internet connection and multiple users you simply decide on your priorities. If you are managing an office or a corporate network, security and employee productivity take precedence. One factor that is not commonly recognized is that unlimited Internet connectivity can harm employee performance. When it comes to business networks 'fast' and 'unlimited' do not optimize productivity. The Internet is rife with spyware and viruses that can significantly threaten your corporate security and productivity. It only takes one virus getting through your security defenses to corrupt or even destroy the information on all of your networked computers, costing you days and weeks of recovery time. Spyware routinely steals sensitive information such as passwords and private documents. Spyware dramatically decreases computer performance and it displays annoying pop-up windows that distract and have to be closed off. Viruses and spyware have effectively paralyzed even the most technologically sophisticated corporations and you can now benefit from what they learned with the safeguards built into UserGate. Expensive productivity threats are not always as covert as viruses or spyware. The Internet holds many distractions to your employees' attention. It has become common for employees to use their office computers and their work time to play online Flash games aptly called 'office killers'. Online chats and instant messengers are a close second to computer games in wasting employee time. If you pay for Internet traffic, an employee using your Internet connection to download music, games or even movies will cost you directly. If your organization uses VoIP to save on long distance bills, it is vital that no employee can use your Internet connection's entire bandwidth. Otherwise your calls will not go through, and you can easily lose a client because of a missed call or because the conversation quality is embarrassingly poor. Even though these various threats are real and are severe, some very highly trained engineers put together a simple solution that minimizes them and increases your employee productivity. UserGate proxy server produced by Entensys (http://www.entensys.com/) provides Internet connectivity to your entire organization while eliminating the usual threats and performance bottlenecks caused by Internet Connection Sharing. UserGate blocks viruses and spyware with its advanced dual-core anti-virus*. UserGate limits your employees to their work assignments instead of socializing over the Internet or wasting time, and it saves on your Internet bills by monitoring, limiting and optimizing the bandwidth used by each employee. *Dual-core anti-virus is very real and very powerful. When Intel released its first dual-core processor, the benefits of increased performance and smoother multitasking became obvious to even the most conservative users. With two anti-virus cores-Panda and Kaspersky-and real-time online updates, UserGate provides tighter security and higher reliability than any single anti-virus solution. Being a proxy server, UserGate prevents spyware and viruses from getting onto your employee computers by scanning all external Internet traffic. Once installed, UserGate becomes the only connection between your employees and the Internet. Workers cannot access anything beyond your corporate network and external influences cannot affect your computers. This approach allows for extremely effective control over how and when your employees can use your Internet connections. You can prohibit access to specific file types, sites, resources or protocols making it impossible for employees to chat, download personal-use files or play online games during their work time. VoIP connections can be prioritized over end-user traffic, allowing for crystal clear phone calls over the Internet. Additionally, thanks to extensive journal support, you will always be able to see exactly what has been accessed by each employee and the bandwidths they consumed. In spite of its sophistication (or because of it), UserGate is easy to install and configure, and it requires no further administration or any extra attention. UserGate improves corporate security and increases employee productivity with no extra effort and zero administration. Download your free evaluation copy now from http://www.entensys.com/ http://www.articlearmies.com/articles/Computers/internet-connection-sharing-made-simple.html 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. There are two ways UserGate can share an Internet connection among your LAN users. One way is to configure it as a gateway, very similar to stand-alone hardware routers. UserGate supports NAT and port mapping in order to share a single IP address between multiple LAN users. Using NAT requires no additional configuration on client computers, and is the fastest way to set up Internet access. If you want more advanced features such as caching your Internet connections, you can set up a User Gate Proxy Server. The proxy server automatically caches the web resources your LAN users access most often, saving significant Internet bandwidth and seriously increasing access speeds. There is no way for your LAN users to bypass UserGate to access the Internet, so you can create powerful rules to control user access to certain resources or protocols. You can also set up content filtering to block unwanted Web sites, resources, or specific file extensions (such as MP3 music). Your LAN is always protected from external attacks by UserGate's built-in firewall. The built-in anti-virus quickly scans all Internet traffic to protect your network from spyware, viruses and malicious software. If you have different kinds of traffic, such as VoIP, you can easily limit the maximum bandwidth for every user in order to ensure that time-sensitive clients get the necessary bandwidth. You can also limit the connection speed for any network user and can control the maximum load of your Internet connection. UserGate keeps complete statistics on every LAN user, including the list of visited URLs and their online time. Its built-in billing makes UserGate a perfect solution for splitting a single Internet connection between several users. The latest version adds VPN support, providing the same connection sharing and statistics features for private and public networks. Support of VPN and transparent proxy makes UserGate a perfect solution for safe and secure Internet connection sharing. UserGate is powerful, user-friendly and simple to use. Download your free evaluation version at: http://www.entensys.com/