Linus' House of IT: 15 cents please

[Linus]

Originally Posted by Andrea

It has been a while since this thread has been used so I am assuming between the financial crisis and inflation your price has gone up. I will deposit a quarter and if that isn't enough, please bill me.

A few days ago our home internet wasn't working. My honey tried the usual: reboot and reset the router. He finally called our provider where he was told to change a setting to No Proxy. It worked.

My honey was frustrated with the whole thing and didn't ask any questions so I am hoping you can explain to me why a setting that had been okay for several years was now not okay. And what is Proxy and how does No Proxy affect us?

Thank you in advance for your sharing your knowledge.

So it sounds like there may be an issue here. First, let's explain what a proxy is.

A proxy is a special kind of computer that acts on behalf of another computer. The term comes from the voting reference (voting by proxy) where someone can have a friend or family member vote on their behalf at things like stock meetings, political meetings, etc.

Usually we use computer proxies for one of two reasons. The first is to surf anonymously. For example, if you visit here, we (the admins) can see what IP address you are accessing the site from and a rough idea where you are (and to be clear, we don't monitor this simply because it's too much time and not something we do unless we have an issue with some or suspect someone of being a spammer).

If you were to access the site through a proxy, every time you visit a page you "ask" the proxy to go to the page. The proxy goes to the page, gets the page information (e.g., text, pictures, etc.) and then turns around sends it back to you. A proxy can be anywhere in the world. So, for example, if I was visiting the website from my home but using a proxy in Tokyo, it would show up as if I was in Tokyo and not Los Angeles.

Hopefully that helps.

Now, on why it changed. I have a question: does the router have wifi on it? And if it does, do you have a password on the wifi and have you changed the default administrator password? Most of the time these routers come with a default admin password and it's very possible that someone could have gotten into the router and changed those settings to use your router to surf.

It is EXTREMELY important to change the password on the router to something that is difficult and not related to anything you like (e.g., movies, tv shows, celebrities) or covet (e.g., kids, spouse, friends, family, furrkids). The password should NOT be less than 12 characters, have both lower and upper case, numbers and special characters (e.g., !@#$%^&*....)