Routers and firewalls can provide similar logging and reporting. Consider which, if any, you want logging and reporting this type of information. Logging and reporting can often be turned on or off or configured to log or report only certain things. Filtering The lines between firewalls and proxy servers can be blurred in some of today's products. The reason the lines have blurred is that proxy servers have taken on some of the duties of the firewall-to control network traffic.
Proxy servers can control network traffic in several ways.
One method Netscape Proxy 2.5 provides is filtering certain type of file, using identifiers known as MIME types. An extremely powerful tool available in Netscape Proxy 2.5 is the ability to filter out specific beginning and ending HTML tags from Web pages before passing the rest of the file along to the client. As the administrator you are offered a few obvious tag sets that you may wish be stripped out of every page before the page gets to the Web browser. For example, administrators may find Java Applets a security risk and therefore configure the proxy server to strip out the and tags, as well as everything in between, so that no Java Applets can be delivered to client computers. Through HTML tag filtering, administrators can even filter out all images or any other HTML tags they want to, by manually specifying those tags in the proxy configuration.