Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Rainbow Connection: Page 2 of 5

A Real Pro

I tested a 1U 2-GHz processor iGate Pro with a single 10/100 NIC supporting only a one-arm network topology. The unit was designed to be deployed within the DMZ, but I configured and used it in a NAT (network address translation) architecture. The enterprise version is available with dual NICs that support both side-arm and one-arm configurations, and I'd suggest it over the Pro for more flexibility.

iGate Pro supports only DA (direct access) mode for securing Web sites--it's essentially a reverse proxy. IA (indirect access) mode uses a single VIP to represent all sites within the organization. You can configure the unit from the admin console using a wizard or manually. Once the iGate is configured to front a Web site, that site is accessible only via a secure HTTP connection. The iGate accepted requests for NWC Inc.'s Web site on Port 80 (clear text), but it sent out a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect to force the browser to use an SSL connection on Port 443.

I configured iGate to use passwords or tokens to authenticate users accessing the NWC Inc. Web site. User configuration is a tedious process, and you must use Rainbow's ACM (Access Control Manager) to assign tokens. ACM is a Java client, requiring JVM 1.3.1 or higher, that communicates with iGate to download and upload access-control configuration of the device. After assigning tokens and passwords to several users, I accessed the site using both.