What is my Wi-Fi proxy?

A Wi-Fi proxy is a machine or router that sits between your PC and the internet.

It helps you browse the web safely. It's like a firewall, but it's only a Wi-Fi connection. Here's everything you need to know about them, including what type of Wi-Fi connection you should get.

What are Wi-Fi proxies? They're great for security because they control which sites and apps you visit. Your Wi-Fi can only access certain websites and apps, all of which are stored in a special folder called 'the Internet'.

You must add specific types of Wi-Fi networks - these are usually known as hotspots - to your web browser for it to work with a Wi-Fi proxy. What are Wi-Fi hotspots? A Wi-Fi hotspot or wireless access point is a place where you can connect your mobile phone, tablet, laptop or other Wi-Fi enabled devices. If your school, employer, restaurant or hospital has a Wi-Fi network, you can use that connection instead of buying a standard router. You can connect your device to the school Wi-Fi using a Wi-Fi proxy. Your device will then connect to the school Wi-Fi using the hotspot connection.

There are several types of Wi-Fi connections, including: Femtocells (also known as 'home-plug' connections). Cero cells. Guest access. Ad-hoc wireless connections. Wired connections. Bluetooth. What is a Wi-Fi hotspot? Wi-Fi hotspots are a convenient way to get high speed internet for free at places such as restaurants, coffee shops and hotels. They usually don't require you to sign a contract or pay a monthly fee. You can pay to use a Wi-Fi hotspot if you want to be charged by the hour, so that you don't overuse it.

You can usually connect up to five devices to a Wi-Fi hotspot. How do I connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot? You may already be familiar with Wi-Fi hotspots because they're everywhere - they're in coffee shops, restaurants and hotel lobbies. Your phone, tablet or laptop will be connected to a router through your home or work Wi-Fi connection.

What is a Wi-Fi proxy used for?

The most common use case is for web proxies.

They allow you to visit a web site while still behind a firewall. There are many different ways to do this. Here are some popular ones:

Port Forwarding. Port Forwarding allows you to map one port on your computer to another port on a remote device. If you are behind a firewall, this allows you to access that remote device as if it was on the same network.

VHosts. In VHosts, you can map one IP address to multiple ports. You can think of it as a host with multiple IP addresses.

IPTables. IPTables is a firewall that supports routing and masquerading. It will allow you to create rules for routing data based on ports.

WiFi Proxy Server. A proxy server allows you to connect to a web site as if it were on the same network. The proxy server sits between your computer and the remote device.

It's also common for people to use a proxy server to anonymize their internet traffic. This allows them to connect to the web and use the internet without being traced. Many web sites now require this to be able to prevent abuse.

Should my Wi-Fi proxy be on or off?

My laptop's wifi adapter is broken so I bought a secondary external USB WLAN adapter.

I am currently setup as an 802.11ac client with the former's WLAN adapter plugged in, connected to ethernet, and using the latter to provide internet access to my laptop (which doesn't have Wi-Fi). When there is an internet browser window open on my laptop, though, if it goes into a page where the server uses https, my browser bar says "Secure Connection Failed," and when I click "OK" or "Try again" it just reloads the page without going through SSL. The connection works fine if I just turn off internet access through the adapter and don't use any browser activity on the laptop's screen. Also, any other applications that try to connect over SSL work fine. I tried to configure internet access this way for when my WLAN adapter is on, and when my router is on but nothing worked. What do you think might be the cause?

1 Answer.
The problem is that, when the secure connection function is activated on a browser, this also means that any program running on the client and trying to make a secure connection is forced to use the encryption method that was chosen when the browser started. I'd start by disabling the proxy setting on your browser. You could also change to another browser which does not force the use of a specific encryption method for secure connections, like Firefox Quantum (and some older Internet Explorer versions) will not require any sort of encryption at all when connecting. You can always change the security level via options in the settings for more control.

Now, back to my answer, if you don't need the Secure Connection anymore then try to switch off the secure connection settings, it will stop being enforced on any application that previously used this type of connection. If it still fails to establish the connection, or it just works out of the blue, my guess would be an invalid certificate on the server side, but without seeing the issue it's pretty hard to say for sure. A better solution to validate whether it's correct is to disable all secure connections when using that specific browser/application and then connect only over regular http/s or something else non-secure.

This usually happens when the server is configured wrong.

What proxy settings should I use?

I know that many people have asked this question in the past, but I still can't find a definitive answer.

I've also tried doing research on the subject myself and I'm pretty sure that I'm looking for an authoritative answer rather than just a few opinions.

Background: I have two computers that I want to be able to access the Internet from, one is running Windows 7 and the other is running Ubuntu. They both have the same DNS server, which is 10.1, and they both have the same network and Internet settings. The only thing that is different is that one of them has a wireless adapter and the other has a wired connection. Both computers can ping the IP address that is linked to the gateway (10.1) successfully. I'd like to access the Internet from either computer, and as far as I know, Windows and Ubuntu should be compatible with each other.

Question: I have no idea how the OS will handle proxy settings. In the past, Ubuntu would always use the proxy settings that I gave it, and Windows would never use any proxy settings. Since there are two computers, both are going to have different proxy settings, and I don't know what they will be. How do I configure proxy settings so that both computers will work? Are there any security concerns with having two computers each configured with their own proxy settings, or is it not a big deal?
Use system-wide configuration as long as you don't mess up with a local settings on your computer. If your settings are global (it's defined in /etc/sysctl.conf), all the machines are gonna have the same proxy. If your settings are user-specific, use environment variables to set these settings.

For instance, you might create an alias in ~/.