Web Proxy service
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The Web Proxy service (w3proxy) is a Windows 2000 service that supports requests from any Web browser. This allows Web access to nearly every desktop operating system, including Windows NT, Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Macintosh, and UNIX. The Web Proxy service works at the application level on behalf of a client requesting an Internet object that can be retrieved using one of the protocols supported by the Web Proxy protocols: File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Gopher. The Web Proxy service also supports the Secure HTTP (HTTPS) protocol for secure sessions using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections.
Web Proxy clients—typically, browsers—must be specifically configured to use the Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server computer. When a user requests a Web site, the browser parses the URL. If a dot address is used, as in a fully-qualified domain name or Internet protocol (IP) address, the browser considers the destination to be remote and sends the HTTP request to the ISA Server computer for processing. For more information, see Configuring Web Proxy clients.
You can use ISA Management to monitor Web Proxy service status. Similarly, you can use ISA Management to stop or start the Web Proxy service. For more information, see Real-time monitoring and Start a service.
When you stop the Web Proxy service, the information in the cache is not deleted. However, when you restart the Web Proxy service, several seconds may pass before the cache is fully enabled and functional. If the Web Proxy service crashed, then ISA Server will restore the information in the cache. This will take some time, and performance may not be optimal until the cache is eventually restored.