Use the Edit->Preferences->Proxies page to set your HotJavaTM Browser proxy servers, as described below.

When you access a Web page, the HotJava Browser tries by default to connect directly to the machine specified in the URL. If you're running the HotJava Browser on a company network, you may find that you can't get access to Web pages outside of your network. This is probably because your company has set up a secure network firewall that can't be penetrated except by going through a proxy server. Proxy servers are programs that handle communication between a protected network and the Internet at large. These programs typically verify users and keep a log of accesses.

If you can't access Web pages outside of your network, you probably need to specify proxy servers. You may need to ask your system administrator for the name of the proxy server you should use, and the corresponding port. The port is the "channel" the proxy uses to listen for particular types of communications requests.

Another reason to use proxies is to improve performance and reduce network traffic. Many proxy servers cache the pages you visit. Caching pages temporarily stores them to disk so they don't have to be downloaded across the network again when they are subsequently accessed. If you have many requests on one network for the same Web pages, it makes a lot of sense to cache the pages in a single place.

You may need to set a different proxy and port for each of the different protocol types (http, https, ftp, and gopher), or you may use the same proxy and port for each type. Your system administrator should tell you what you need.

SOCKS is another kind of server that allows access across a network firewall. Ask your system administrator if you should be using SOCKS or the protocol proxy servers, and the name of the appropriate server(s).

You can bypass your proxies when connecting to designated hosts, such as hosts within your firewall. Type the names of the hosts you want to connect to directly, without using proxies, in the Don't Proxy text field. Use the full host name, in the form host.domain (for example, `myhost.mycompany.com`). Separate multiple host names by spaces or carriage returns.

You can also designate entire domains in the Don't Proxy field by entering a domain name that starts with a period. For example, type `.mycompany.com` to bypass the proxies for all hosts in the mycompany.com domain.

If you haven't designated any proxies, it isn't necessary to fill in the Don't Proxy field. In this case, no proxies will be used at any time.

HotJava supports NCSA 1.3.A and CERN 3.0 proxy servers, and later versions.

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