Reverse Proxy (Web only?)
 

We have a DMZ that contains 2 DNS servers, an SMTP relay, about 12 webservers and a database server.

We are in the process of buying hardware to create a reverse proxy. I was wondering if I can route all the traffic through the reverse proxy or just web traffic?

For example can I use the reverse proxy to proxy DNS queries?

Thanks

well a reverse proxy is a concept more than a thing in itself. It's certainly a term most closely related to http servers, as they require that deeper level of configuration when passing traffic inside though. There are certainly many ways to get DNS traffic to an internal node though. Initially, why can't you just route it? What difference does that provide to you compared to this proxying? You wouldn't actually proxy a DNS request in the same sense as HTTP traffic, but you certainly could put up a simple BIND forwarder, which would only be able to forward requests to internal servers at that DNS level. If you do that, you might as well put in some caching too I guess. The typical "caching only nameserver" would be a pretty good start. But unless this is serving as a genuine border device, which in itself is not exactly awesome, then there's not a necessarily a huge benefit in doing any of this depending on what you'll think you've gotten out of it.