What is a Proxy Server?

What is a proxy server?

• Is this a good definition? "A proxy server acts as an intermediary and still does the same job of opening documents and web pages. In other words, an external server that gathers the same information from the web page requested by a client but instead of it being the main server, it links with the main server in order to provide the exact information"

• Answer:

  Basically yes, it's a way of having a firewall, but not, so if anything happens it will hit the proxy server before it hits your computer. It's still essentially your computer mind you, but just a seperate protocol. Let's say you have a network, the main server is a Dell Server right? Well you don't want it to be directly open to attack, that would be bad, so you set up another computer on the network to be the proxy server, so if an attack does happen the proxy server will get it first, leaving your Dell Server secure.