User Authentication Strategies in Multi-Institutional Environments > Overview of Proxy Servers > Proxies for remote resource access

Transparent versus non-transparent proxy servers

Transparent Proxy

A proxy that passes requests and responses unmodified, except as required for proxy authentication.

Non-transparent Proxy

A proxy that somehow modifies the request or response to provide some added value to the client or user.

Rewriting Proxies

A special form of the Non-transparent Proxy server which examines the URLs in HTML documents passing through the proxy, and rewrites them to point back to the proxy server

"http://firstsearch.oclc.org/dbname=WorldCat;graphics=low;FSIP" becomes
"http://proxy.college.edu/firstsearch/dbname=WorldCat;graphics=low;FSIP" or
"http://proxy.college.edu:2049/dbname=WorldCat;graphics=low;FSIP" or
"http://80-firstsearch.oclc.org.proxy.college.edu/dbname=WorldCat;graphics=low;FSIP"