Do firewall and proxy mean the same?

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hello Daelin, like you i was also initially confused between these two things.but now i think i could explain you the difference. although a firewall and a proxy may perform similar tasks,they are by no means the same thing.the main purpose of proxy server is to act as a gateway from private network to a public network and to offer some caching capability to a number of client machines accessing internet through it.but a firewall provides a detailed method of separating and protecting private networks,public networks,DMZs(demilitarized zones) and remote access to private networks. proxies are actually firewalls but they lack the capability of routing that a firewall provides.a proxy operates on application layer and cares about the application itself.so you can say firewall in true sense is combination of packet filtering and proxy.if you disable the proxy there is no way to connect from the LAN to the internet servers but if you disable the firewall then all LAN stations have direct and full internet access. and moreover firewalls can be both hardware and softwares.you can go for a product that can be both proxy and firewall like Microsoft's ISA,cisco IOS,wingate etc.that way you will have both of them in your pc. i hope i am of some help to you.your friend.

Well they r not exactly same... Firewall is something that blocks the services or any ip address while proxy is mean of distribution of service to other computers in network. If proxy dont provide any service that means its acting like a firewall. So proxy server is something that can act like firewall.

um how i msut explain you, firewall is a software or now hardware that help to preven unhautorised acces to a certain computer in this case yours, a proxy is a server that you uses to conect to internet, actually ther is a special uisage to proxys that posible is what your brother tells you, you can set tup a proixy(you msut optain and IP and port) to make your conection to internet trough it, instead, that will make the pages you enter shows the proxy addres isntead of your one example msut nbe i live ion mexy if a i set up a proxy from USA all pages i enter will beleive i am from usa, so this can be uses for 2 thinks, increase secuyrity and surf anonymous páge that only accept certain country members