Connect Your Whole LAN to the Web with a Single IP Address Simply and Securely.

If you want to connect a local region network (LAN) in your office to the Net today, you have a number of choices to pick from. The simplest is to get a little stand-alone router or gateway. These devices are inexpensive, reliable and mostly plug-and-play. If you know what you’re performing, you can configure a router and network in much less than an hour. Nevertheless, this may possibly not be your greatest option.

There are significant reasons why a router is not the greatest answer. How secure does your data require to be? Do you want (or would like) to know exactly how much World wide web traffic every of your PCs consumes? Do you have priority visitors that need to get by way of? Do you have employees that may well be utilizing the Internet for purposes other than work?

A easy hardware gateway will not satisfy these conditions. You could invest a little fortune for a sophisticated device that would satisfy some of these and still not have the optimum remedy.

An alternative to high-priced hardware is setting up a dedicated pc to control World wide web access and connectivity. In this case, your choice is economically limited to 1 of two platforms: *nix or Windows. Although *nix (Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) is technically terrific for the task, it is not as cost effective in a typical firm with a multitude of Windows PCs. A *nix system bears a really crucial drawback: you will either have to hire a system administrator to manage it, or be unable to fine-tune Net access and continuously risk network failure.

Making use of a dedicated Windows PC to control how your LAN users access the World wide web is the only remaining option.

While Windows itself supplies a limited set of basic connectivity features, you will need to buy 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 firm may well call for.

There are two techniques UserGate can share an Internet connection among your LAN users. 1 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 demands no additional configuration on client computers, and is the fastest way to set up Internet access.

If you want a lot more advanced features such as caching your Web connections, you can set up a User Gate Proxy Server. The proxy server automatically caches the web resources your LAN users access most typically, saving significant Web bandwidth and seriously increasing access speeds.

There is no way for your LAN users to bypass UserGate to access the World wide web, so you can create powerful rules to control user access to specific 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 often protected from external attacks by UserGate’s built-in firewall. The built-in anti-virus speedily scans all Net visitors to protect your network from spyware, viruses and malicious software.

If you have different kinds of traffic, such as VoIP, you can quickly limit the maximum bandwidth for each user in order to ensure that time-sensitive clients get the essential bandwidth. You can also limit the connection speed for any network user and can control the maximum load of your Web connection.

UserGate keeps complete statistics on each and every LAN user, which includes the list of visited URLs and their on-line time.

Its built-in billing makes UserGate a ideal answer for splitting a single Web connection between various users.

The newest version adds VPN support, supplying the exact same connection sharing and statistics features for private and public networks. Support of VPN and transparent proxy makes UserGate a perfect answer 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/