For the Amiga enthusiast who has a seriously beefed up system there is plenty that you can do with your TCP stack. Certainly much more than just connect to the Internet. To do the following I have assumed that you have a Amiga of any type with an ethernet card (I use a Hydra unit on my A1200) and a suitable PC also with a network card.
So what is a Proxy server well a simple statement would be it allows you to share the modem card on the PC and dial up the internet from your Amiga using the PC's card. There is much more to it than that you could set up your amiga on a PC network use an internal Internet service (Intranet) to browse your companies internal web site, send emails to others within your company and then at the click of a button on your email package send an email to the Internet or even browse the internet. This means that we have an ideal world were the PC is the slave to our favourite machine literally acting as a server to all our inter/intranet needs.
To use a proxy at home or at work we need software for the PC and for the AMiga. On the PC you need a decent proxy server. These dont come cheap in fact most PC software actually costs you heavily Micro$oft proxy will cost currently around 600 uk pounds. Then you need something to handle all your emails to sort them out and deliver them to the right machines on the network. Again Micro$oft sell Exchange server at 800 UK Pounds. But dont be disheartened. There is a growing movement on the PC now for Freeware. This software in many cases is much better than the commercial offerings. One such package is the freeware Proxy server "Sambar" at http://www.sambar.com which is a superb proxy for FTP, POP3 , SMTP, HTTP etc and has an excellent configuration front end, all for FREE!!!! It even includes a basic firewall!! This package will allow you to connect to your PC using AMIFTP, the internet without a modem being on your Amiga, Send emails to the user on you PC, Send emails to your friends on the Internet, read newsgroups etc all from your Amiga leaving your serial port free. To use it though you need to have a SOCKS enabled TCP stack, Miami in its later incarnations includes this, but if you use Amitcp you will need to download the SOCKS addons from Aminet socksproxy.lha is the client side i.e the part where the Amiga connects to the PC and the PC connects to the internet. If you want to reverse the process and use a modem on the Amiga from the PC then you need a socks server on the Amiga Socks5.lha should do that.
If you want to run an internal email service, say on all your machines at home so you can email the wife in the living room whilst you are upstairs then you need a mailserver. Again the Freeware guys come to the rescue here with the rather good "inetse" package. This package can be a bit of a dog to get configured up but once you have figured out how the thing is configured you will find it is pretty excellent. It is a small program so uses very little hard-drive space and allows internal email as well as mail forwarding to the internet. You can pick this up from http://www.nonags.com .
On the Amiga the only other thing you require is an email package there are a couple of good ones about "Thor" is a good bet, you can download it from Aminet or get it from the support site at http://www.thule.no/thor
With that little lot installed you should have a very nice little network running making much more use of your investment in ethernet cards.
If there is enough interest I will cover setting up the TCP stacks for the above in another webpage email the webmaster to register your interest.
Other sites of interest are
http://www.deerfield.com/wingate which supplies wingate which is a highly respected proxy server which is shareware and I understand that only version 2.1 beta works with the amiga
http://www.eu.jgaa.com this is an awseome site for freeware networking packages all written by the webmaster for the PC. There are some excellent links from this site to other freeware sites but some links are now broken.