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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T09:21:51+00:00

It has nothing to do file-descriptors. Is it some sort of connection between different

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It has nothing to do file-descriptors. Is it some sort of connection between different protocols? Does there exist more like that? Reverse -proxy? Direct -proxy? Indirect -proxy? Does proxy mean 3-layer, 7-layer or different layer in OSI reference model? If you have NAT, you have 3-layer while 7-layer is the common proxy according to Wikipedia here. The Wikipedia continues "Because NAT operates at layer-3, it is less resource-intensive than the layer-7 proxy, but also less flexible" — there are different kind of ways of doing the proxy:

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So now a very stupid and irrogant question "What is a proxy in Apache?"

Other ignorant Questions by which I try to understand the proxies deeper

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12397242/explain-apache-mod-proxy-module-is-it-overused-and-many-times-a-red-herring-w

  2. Explain CouchDB's serving of websites, is CouchDB bundled somehow with Apache and how does it work?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Apache is a layer-7 proxy (as far as OSI is concerned), it doesn’t use network address translation or any type of packet mangling/rewriting. It receives a request and based on some rules/configuration, makes a request on behalf of the client. Apache can act as a forward proxy and/or reverse proxy. In your images above, apache would be running on the blob that is red.

    • In the first image, apache would be acting as a reverse proxy, it receives an HTTP request from the internet, and proxies it to a specific place internally.

    • In the second image, apache acts as a forward proxy. Local users are using it to request anything on the internet (within the rules/config).

    • In a reverse proxy, a request for a specific resource is received, e.g. http://my.homepage.com/, and apache, knowing that the content is actually internally located at http://192.168.2.45/my.homepage/, proxies the request to the internal location.

    • In a forward proxy, a user on a LAN requests http://www.google.com/, and either the browser or OS knows to proxy the request to a local proxy server (apache, the red blob in the image), and apache then makes the request to http://www.google.com on the user’s behalf.

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